


half of my soul

by vansgoghing



Category: The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Inspired by The Song of Achilles, M/M, POV Patroclus, References to Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:39:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 61,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26265859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vansgoghing/pseuds/vansgoghing
Summary: In a different time and in a different place, two boys find that they inexplicably gravitate towards each other, their mannerisms as familiar to each other as something from a half-remembered dream ...(A university au that's not really a university au, you'll see what I mean)
Relationships: Achilles/Patroclus (Song of Achilles)
Comments: 98
Kudos: 265





	1. Chapter 1

It was like remembering a half-forgotten dream, seeing the boy through the metallic tangle of the fence. 

The way he moved was liquid grace. Leaping over the hurdles as effortlessly as water cascading over a fall, hitting the ground with strides swift as a savannah predator on the chase, his feet striking the track so sparsely it seemed that he was flying. The way he stopped at the end of the track, winded but lightly so; his cheeks flushed scarlet from effort, yet his exertion appearing so thoughtless, so natural. He prowled at the end of the 100 meter mark as a lion awaiting its pride would, as the other boys tumbled across the finish line in lagging.

I stood rooted by the gnarls of the silvery fence, unable to drag my eyes away from that boy. His restlessness hypnotized me; the way he seemed caged inside a mortal body, as if he were a spirit destined to inhabit a different, swifter form: a sandpiper, a viper, a lion. His hair was a honey-brown. Yet between blinks, as if by a trick of sunlight, it appeared the vivid gold of the sun itself, as if touched by Midas, before it would bleed back into a more earthbound color. Even at a distance, his dimpled cheeks caught the eye. The elegant planes of his face felt so familiar yet unknown to me, as if studied from a photograph but never caught in life. 

It was only my second week at Aegean State, and everyday I was seeing new people for the first time in my life. Yet despite the fact that the boy fell into that mass, for I had never laid eyes on him before my chance walk by the track, he felt so inherently familiar that I could not proceed past without stopping to watch him. My mind begged to recognize him — from seeing the way he ran and jumped, knowing each coming move before it came as if I had watched him do this a hundred, a thousand times. From seeing his joyous exhalation at coming first, the way he tipped his head back to the sky in a motion so uncannily familiar that it tugged at a severed string in my heart. From the way his face ignited when the coach came to clap him in awe on the back, knowing how his eyes without being able to study them at such a distance were set aflame in admiration for his own prowess.

I did not know his name, I did not know where he came from. I knew he was the best athlete that ASU ever had without knowing a thing about the university’s athletics or its history. I knew that even though I had never met him, I inherently knew him, like one would know the sound of the ocean without ever having laid eyes on it. 

“Are you coming? I think they are done,” my friend Levi says at my shoulder, a hint of impatience coloring his voice. I had stopped without explanation to watch the track team’s practice, forgetting altogether about his presence. We had been walking back together to the dorms from our last class of the day, after which we had lingered long enough in the library that we managed to catch a glimpse of the runners out on the track.

I turn to Levi, smiling in what I hope is apologetic in suggestion. “I’ve never seen them practice before,” I say, falling into step with his purposeful walk back to the dorms. “It was pretty cool to see how fast they were.”

“They sure run faster than their brains go,” Levi says with evident distaste. Levi’s a pre-med major just like I am, and as fate would have it my roommate too. We therefor stuck together out of pure habit if nothing else, bounded by the indisputable oath that comes from both being friendless.

Despite our shared field of study and quarters we could not be more different; especially evident in our respective admiration or repulse for sport. Levi was a pale, waif-like boy that worshipped rigorous academia and saw everything outside of it as a frivolity. I was never a super-athlete myself, but it’s not like I didn’t try; my youth was filled with botched sports pressed on by my progressively more frustrated father who wanted a son but got a boy instead. My curse of clumsiness may have discouraged any appetite I could have festered for sport, yet I never lost the curious eye for it, for feasting on the beauty in humans who were infatuated by the abilities of their own bodies. 

We were rounding the end of the track. Levi held a brisk pace, clearly anxious after the unexpected delay to stick his nose into his mounds of homework. I try to keep up, but my legs seem to lag on their own accord as if bewitched. My head cranes back without my own willing, trying to seize a last glimpse of that divinely swift-footed boy. He still meanders at the finish line, his back positioned towards me as he speaks to one of his teammates. The late afternoon sun illuminates his bright turquoise jersey, and the watch on his wrist blinks blindingly in the sunlight as he rakes a hand absently through his hair, which falls in waves that curl coquettishly just a little below his ears.

Just then we round the corner of the building adjacent the track, and he's gone.

The last I caught of him had been a blur of turquoise and lightening-white glare, yet his silhouette holds strong in my eyes, as if I had known the curves and planes of his body my whole life. 

-

The week that came was as tedious as ever. Chemistry quizzes, biology lab reports, nights of dizzying calculus grinds. If not for Levi I would not have been so religious with studying, but there is not much else to do when your roommate becomes an antisocial hermit the second he crosses outside the threshold of a lecture hall. My only consolation was nesting with him in the library until the sunlight slanted at such an angle through the tall dusty windows that meant it was about time that the track practice would be on. 

I flew the coop, having exhausted my study efforts, leaving Levi to pore over his textbooks with his headphones clamping him into a different dimension. It was a perfect summer’s afternoon outside — the sky a clear azure, the world laden with golden sunlight as heavy as honey, the mint-green leaves of a eucalyptus practically dripping with it. 

The snake of the track was illuminated a rich maroon, the sweat-slick runners milling about it glistening like fish liberated from water. And there he was again, always appearing at the epicenter of it all, with the rest of the boys seamlessly falling into a loose cluster around him. He seemed to magnetize every individual in his vicinity without being aware of it, a flower among the bees. They were stretching, with him stooping slightly to flex his leg. The rest of the boys echoed the pose, yet it was not like they were paying attention to what he was doing; it was the natural ripple of the wind seamlessly blowing the grass stalks in the same direction. 

Mondays through Thursdays the track team’s practice occupied the field some time between the hours of four and six, as far as I was aware. My stroll was slow yet purposeful as always, never allowing myself more than three whole minutes of walking down one length of the track. I kept my head tilted down apathetically towards the pavement while sneaking sideways glances at the field from the side of my glasses. It always felt so criminal to me, so infringing to continuously breach into this brief segment of someone’s life. It was almost like sneaking into another movie screening when at the cinema after your own movie is over, of knowing you have the wrong ticket and dismissing the possibility of being caught. Besides, it’s not like I was the lone creep that consistently meandered by the track on a daily basis; I’ve begun to note some familiar faces migrating by as well that seem to have overlapping time loops with mine. Yet their interests in the athletes always seemed open and ephemeral, just a curious listing of the head at the slap of shoe soles of a runner pounding by. They appeared immune to the addiction of having their eyes lock on the same individual over and over again.

I was doing my weird sideway squint now at the track, since my field of vision became a mess every time I peered at odd angles from out behind my glasses. I could just make out the graceful ark of a body dipped into a stretch, of a messy cascade of curls being haphazardly swept out of the face with a hand. I blink my eyes just once against the harsh glimmer of the sun and he's suddenly looking up straight at me, his face swelling with the easy warmth with which I came to learn was his default expression for addressing people. My feet are rooted as he straightens from the stretch and lifts a single rosy-palmed hand in greeting, his eyes still caught on mine across the grass and rubber and paint of the field. I feel my mouth open in the stupefied gape of a fish, grasping for words but feeling only a trickle of surprised silence dribble from my lips. I'm about to lace two comprehensible syllables of sound together, but just then a jubilant shout peels from behind my shoulder, startling me into probably aging a few years in a second. 

“Yes Oli! Yes! You go brother!” 

I feel myself turn in slow-motion to find a jock-type boy hollering from directly behind me, a heavy arm thrown brutishly around the slender shoulders of a fox-faced looking girl. She's visibly cringing at the shouts being emitted right by her ear, and my dysfunctional mind briefly passes the thought of concern about whether her hearing will remain intact for long from having the most raucous boyfriend in the world. He seems the football type, and he must be — he wears a preppy turquoise and white jacket with the university’s emblem pasted on his front: a soldier head with one of those bristled Greek helmets, the school’s mascot _Myrmidons_ inscribed in glittery cursive under the logo. 

The boy — Oil — gives a smile so bright as to rival the sun. He does an odd little hand gesture that could mean _Hello_ or _Goodbye_ or _Look at this weirdo who thought I was waving at him_ , but whatever it was it seems to satisfy his Goliath-looking friend who utters another very short but loud keen. I can sense that he and his skinny hostage are about to proceed along on their stroll, so I decide to beat them to leaving by performing a spastic movement that turns into a hurried walk. 

I keep my head down for good now, my cheeks burning as if I laid them on the stove. My embarrassment's so palpable that I felt nauseated, my guts churning as my evil mind loops the last few minutes over and over again with increasing vividness. I was in such a distraught haze that I hadn’t even noticed that I made it to the dorms, until I was barging into the room with Levi unresponsively staring at a page covered with the baffling language of calculus. Time skips and I'm in my bed with my face crushed into a pillow that has absorbed the musty smell of the dorm room, only half-noticing how my glasses are painfully digging into the bridge of my nose. I turn over onto my back and scrunch my eyes with my fingers, a soft groan escaping my lips that articulates every nasty feeling that is coursing through me. 

The only thing keeping me from loathing my whole existence at that moment is the brilliant, unexpected treasure I had received in the midst of it all: that whole-hearted smile, so full and unrestrained and genuine that it could move heaven, raise hell. If I can just keep imagining that it was actually meant for me, then the world might just turn out to be an alright place.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is very ~lightly~ edited. As a pre-med major as well, if I'm not studying then I'm stressing/crying about studying so writing ends up going somewhere in between that schedule.

Bio lectures were always a specific kind of torture. My class schedule made sure they came after lunch three times a week, so it was difficult not to fall asleep in the stuffy and stale air of the primitive lecture hall. The monotone drawl of the professor accentuated the air of drowsiness, along with his constant fumbling with the projector that delayed the lecture for minutes at a time. Sometimes Levi would pointedly poke me with the end of his pencil when my chin weighed on the palm of my hand, my glasses half skewed. Sometimes I would poke Levi with the end of my pencil when I’ve had enough on hearing about photosynthesis. 

The worst of it all though was not the perpetual lethargy lasting for ninety minutes. It was that for ninety minutes I had to sit in the same hall as Oli, ASU’s golden boy, the legendary track star, the shining god of the university. It was by the wicked chance of the universe that I first noticed the glimmer of his bronze head in a window’s sunlight at the back of the lecture hall at biology following the day of that almost-encounter at the track. I had stopped obsessively walking by the track after that, but I could still not outrun his celestial, flamboyant presence that haunted me from ten rows back. He always sat in the thick of the most boisterous gaggle, the type of students that could recite in full confidence that ‘the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell’ with fits of giggles and nothing more. They were all constantly chewing their gum and smacking their lips and clicking their pens, electrified and restless, a gathering of hummingbirds locked in a cage.

All except for Oli. He sat with this imperious stillness in the midst of their buzzing, indifferent as a cliff pounded by the sea. Every time I chanced a glance back, by pretending to scratch my chin against my shoulder or to twist in my seat to stretch my back, he always sat in the same frozen pose — the slight, curious birdlike tilt of his head, the focused squint of his eyes. He always held a pen in his hand poised to write, but I’ve yet to see it move.

The truth is though, no matter how my eyes itch to catch a flash of his jovial honey-tan face in a crowd, no matter how my ears strain to pick up on the cadence of his name being thrown around guffawing mouths, I made hating him my new obsession. 

The way he threw around the currency of smiles so carelessly. The way he made heads turn and eyes follow him without consciously knowing, consciously trying. The way he bounded across the track, his movements seemingly so infinite and free, a miracle of genetics and aptitude that so many drew the short stick on. The way he inhabited my head day and night, startling me from my dreams, waking me with the phantom of his face etched in the early morning fog of my mind. I tried to bring every perfect, glimmering facet of him to ruination before my eyes. Yet it came to an impossible paradox — the more I looked for ways to etch my hatred around him the more beautiful he became, every detail of him growing enlivened, ethereal.

I could try hating him at a distance, at ten rows back.

Then ten rows became five. Became two. Became the end of the same row. Became the graceful profile of his face in a seat down the line, the haughty curve of his nose illuminated in the dark room against the glow of the projector screens. The palm of my hand became slick around the grip of my pencil, the diagrams on the screen began to shimmer at the edges along with my focus. My notes were hasty — riddled with blackholes of accidental punctures, words dripping off the neat blue lines. Yet I didn’t change the same seat I had since the start of the semester. It would mean giving ground in a battle that I didn’t even know I was fighting in.

Today happened to fall on the rare occurrence of me coming to claim our customary seats at lecture without Levi, since he had informed me in his timely manner of twenty-four hours in advance that he would be coming separately from a meeting with a professor. The tide of students from the previous lecture had just ebbed, so I had an almost whole row and a completely whole ten minutes to myself before biology began. I hacked away at my calculus homework on the narrow wooden tray that came with each seat, each problem a fresh stab-wound to my inadequately caffeinated brain. 

The hiss of someone sliding into the chair next to mine startles me out of my numbers and integrals. A waft of fresh rain and eucalyptus, a presence as persistent as the red glow of the sun behind your closed eyelids. A voice slow and drawn, like honey being poured from a spoon. My hand freezes halfway through an equation. 

“Hey, I know you’re smart.” 

The statement is so strange, so out-of-sorts of a normal greeting that I almost want to laugh. 

“What makes you say so?” My voice comes oddly steady, detached from the movement of my lips. I stare hard at my paper, knowing that if I looked up, I would be done.

“Because you ask the questions that no one thinks to ask.”

At this I can’t help lifting my eyes. He looks at me with such frankness, with eyes so brown and warm like melted chocolate. It’s not the eyes of someone you could say no to. 

My mouth suddenly feels too dry to speak, so I shrug. My social anxiety works in a funny little way where I’m terrified to hold an individual conversation with a person while I feel oddly calm asking a question in front of three hundred people. I can’t say it’s a fact that defines me as being smart; it’s pathetic more than anything. 

He looks away for a flicker of a moment and draws in a breath, as if he could possibly be feeling as nervous as I am. It happens so fast, so subtly that I almost think I imagine it.

“Look, I understand you must be busy, and I’m intervening —” he motions to the skewed pages of my homework “— but I was wondering if you could like, explain the whole cellular respiration thing to me if you have a minute.”

“Uh,” I shuffle around my calculus papers, grasping for a minute to process this. “Uh, sure,” I manage, gracelessly shoving my homework back into my bag and pulling out my bio notebook. I flip through the pages until I get to cellular respiration and slide the notebook over to him. He shakes his head.

“I don’t need the notes. I need to understand it.” He says it so simply, unabashedly. I can feel the eyes and ears of the people beginning to trickle in all around us, yet he doesn’t buckle under their scrutiny. His face is patient and placid, laid bare before me — I know that if I refuse he wouldn’t find hurt, yet there’s something in me that finds the idea of turning him away so unnatural, like willingly deciding to cut my own limb off.

“Um, yeah, okay,” I mumble, sliding the notebook between us and turning the page to my cramped drawing of the steps of cellular respiration. I trace my pencil over the arrows and labels. “So it’s got all these steps, right, like glycolysis, the Krebs cycle, oxidative phosphorylation —”

“Wait, sorry, what is your name? I feel like I should know it,” he cuts in, sounding genuinely apologetic.

Asking for my name seems like such a superficial nicety, almost a justification for the trouble of pestering me. The least you could do is pretend to remember the name of a person to seem grateful. Though yet again my eyes inadvertently slip up to his face, and he’s looking at me with such intent and genuine curiosity, like my name is the answer to a centuries-long question. I hastily look away, pretending to retrace a cramped word in my notes, trying to drown the sheepish burn in my gut.

“Adrian,” I say. 

“Adrian,” he repeats, nodding to himself as if he knew all along. For a moment I’m infatuated with the way he says my name, rolling out every syllable like a sweet to be savored, the six little letters becoming holy when held in his mouth. 

I can’t believe I’ve tried hating the way he spoke before. That excessive roundness he shapes his words around, the patient way he finishes a sentence when everyone else rushes to the end, asphyxiating under the collection of so many sounds strung together. It’s like the cadence of his voice was made to say my name, my name made to be shaped by his lips.

 _A-dree-anne._ He says it prettily and carefully, like naming a flower — none of the guttural growl it’s been getting crushed to my whole life. 

“I know your name already,” I blurt out. The sentence isn’t finished unspooling from my mouth, and already I’m reaching to snatch the words out of the air. 

“Oh?” He says. There’s a playful curve to his mouth, something between a smirk and a smile.

“It’s Oli … isn’t it?” My heart gives a trip for a second; I’m suddenly afraid that I’ve misremembered, or misheard, or mispronounced his name. I’ve stewed on every visible and figurative aspect of him that I’m not sure what’s real or what my mind colored in the blanks with for me. 

“Yeah,” he says, shrugging. “My full name’s Oliver, but I think it’s gone a little out of fashion.” 

He looks away all of the sudden, and I can see what his eyes are tracking: the professor just came in, slapping his tattered folder on the presentation stand.

“Right,” I say, getting back to my smudgy notes. “Cellular respiration is just like made up of these separate cycles and processes, that each produce and use different amounts of like ATP and NAD —“

Oli’s attention catches and skips again, suddenly as a needle skitters across a record. I follow the thread of his gaze and see Levi, looking bemused and a little affronted that his usual seat is taken by an imposter. He stands in the middle of the row, practically treading in place since his brain isn’t exactly wired for this sort of situation. Levi looks at Oli, and Oli looks back at me.

“Sorry, I’ve spent too much talking as usual,” Oli says with a breezy shrug. He’s already slipping out of Levi’s seat, but I grab the sleeve of his sports jacket. There’s a moment where we both look down at my fingers caught on the shimmery blue fabric. I’m sure my face is at a million degrees, but I push through it with a mumble. 

“I could meet you at the library, or something.” I’m already looking away, letting go.

“I’ll text you then, or something.” I don’t need to look up, I hear that soft half-smile in his voice. Then he’s gone in a rustle of fabric, slinking gracefully past the people seated in the crowded row as he would move around the hurdles. Levi doesn’t wait to crash down beside me in the empty seat, his jittery fingers flying frantically through his notebook as the lecture begins. I’m staring into empty space, my pen poised in midair, the professor’s words moving unimpeded into and out of my head like a river through a tunnel when it hits me, that he never even got my number.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did I finish writing this at 4am? yes. did I get emotional near the end and channel my experiences of being an athlete? yes. 
> 
> anyway.
> 
> just wanted to make a sort of disclaimer that I do not know that much about track athletes besides that they run, like a lot, (i'm in like a completely different sport, so I actually had to look up a few things) but please feel free to call me out on my bs and any discrepancies pertaining to being a track athlete. I actually want to keep from sounding like I have no clue what I'm talking about, because I don't.

_There’s the chariots clattering, the dusty stomp of horse hooves in the dirt. There’s a whine in the air, a ceaseless ringing of metal building in my ears like tinnitus. Streaks of wine-red in the dry grass like carelessly spilt paint; there is a bite of iron on my tongue that feels just like the dust inhaled though my nose when my face twists against the crusted ground. There’s always a golden aura, dancing right at the edge of my periphery. Like a ribbon of sunlight he weaves through those dark stalks of smoke that press in on me with their whining metal and rotten miasma; they dispel at his touch just like he does at mine._

_It’s always a_ he _, not an_ it. _I know it in my bones, the way his soul presses and pours into mine — yet he’s so fleeting, like a half-caught reflection in the window, there and gone in a shift of light. His name is on my lips in the bruised dawn of a tent canvas, his name is on my lips when that fire blooms in my stomach, twisting and writhing as the blade gnaws through tissue and bone. He shimmers just beyond my sight, my fingers reach to clasp an aureate lock of hair as he lays just beyond me at the edge of the dark, my mouth whispering —_

The phone chimes beside my head on my pillow, startling me out my half-smothered sleep. I fall from the dream with the force of a diver hitting the water, the breath knocked clean out of my lungs as I lie on my bed with that disorientating feeling of drifting too far down the tether from the waking world and suddenly being jerked back. My eyes feel sticky as they always do after these dreams; it takes me a few moments to shake off the heavy residue it leaves me with that borders on being awake in a hallucinatory state, to exhale the lingering dust of that world and even my breathing. I finally roll over and locate my glasses and grab my phone, which flashes a time at me that is well into the depths of the night. Just below the blocky numbers hovers a text. 

_hi hi hi_

I squint at my luridly bright screen, the ambiguous greeting swimming in my achy eyes and falling flat in my wrung-out mind. It’s a number that’s not been saved, the area code an unfamiliar combination of digits. 

_Who is this?_ I reply, since a few minutes have passed and there has been a lack of elaboration. The one thing that became clear in college is that no one bothers to sign their name to a new text. It’s just not classy.

The phone chimes again. I wince. 

_ur girlfriend_

I pinch the bridge of my nose just above my glasses, thinking of what to reply, but then I decide to wait. Sure enough, a text bubble shows up with its little dancing ellipsis. I feel the vibration of my phone sink into my hand and tingle through my nerves as I see the message that appears on the screen.

_just kidding, it’s oli_

I almost want to laugh. Who else could it be? I roll over on my side and face the wall, since Levi likes giving me shit about being a disrespectful roommate when the glare of my phone interferes with his caffeinated dreams. I bite my lip and type. 

_Hi Oli. How did you get my number?_

My phone chimes almost instantly. I hurry to mute it; I think I hear the irked creak of Levi’s mattress. 

_i have connections_

Of course he does, through like the whole school. It’s disconcerting to think that somehow my phone number is swimming on its own through the student population. 

_Why are you up so late?_ I text back.

The phone buzzes softly in my hand. _aren’t we in college?_

A valid answer.

I can only imagine though that his late night constitutes the opposite of mine — hazy parties where the bass pulses softly through the speakers, beer gone flat in one of those generic plastic red cups. He might be higher than the clouds and philosophizing about the universe right now for all I know, but somehow my existence has wriggled into his mind at this odd hour and he’s remembered to text me days after his promise. 

I want to ask him the real reason for why he’s up so late and why he’s decided to text me now, of all the times, in the abyss of the night, but I don’t know how to phrase it without sounding too prying or obsessive. I’ve always been a dry texter since I put more thought behind every word than I should. I needn’t worry now, though — he manages to fill the white space for me. 

_i don’t know if ur still up for this and its totally fine if u aren’t but i was wondering if u could still like help me out in bio since we have that exam coming and i don’t rlly know what’s going on ive been so busy with practices and etc can offer food or whatever in exchange for ur services let me know pls_

I stare at the string of words for a minute, chewing them over in my head. I’ve typed out my answer and my finger hovers over the _send_ key. 

I owe him nothing, I hardly know him. Anyone else I would politely refuse, after sticking my planner in their face that’s so crammed with deadlines and activities that there’s more ink than paper visible. But again there’s that peculiar feeling, akin to the whisper in my gut that I get when I’m chasing that flutter of gold in my dreams — like it’s the right thing to do, the only thing to do, the thing I was always meant to do. 

_Sure_ , I answer. I feel a stupid smile tease across my lips. Not a minute passes before my phone lights up again. 

_:)_

And then:

_goodnight adrian_

-

Oli can’t study in a library. That fact became adamantly clear when I kept seeing his face tilt ever-so-slightly sideways to read the titles of book spines down the shelf right by our table, or the fact that every bit of movement — a person trotting by, the librarian stacking books onto the cart, a pencil scratching across a paper — ensnared his attention, fully and ruthlessly.

“The air is so stale in there,” was the first thing he said after our first session, wrinkling his nose in the petulant manner of a little boy once we had gotten outside.

“And that’s on musty old books and the smell of many brains decomposing within their skulls,” I had said, and that was that. 

So we settled on being outdoors, at sitting at one of the benches tucked away in the expanse of the university green, right under the tranquil canopy of a sycamore. The buildings are just far enough that all the bustle surrounding them is muted, and the only real motion is the gentle bobbing of the leaves and branches in the breeze. Even though sometimes a pack of students might roam by, hunting for a vacant bench on the green, Oli’s attention never strays from the task at hand — somehow being out in the air and sun focuses and stills him, narrows his awareness into something that can be tamed. It eventually dawned on me as to why he sits so preternaturally still at lectures, when every cell and fiber of him craves motion: his senses become so overtaxed, so ecstatic by being held in a confined space with hundreds of people pressing in at all sides, with novel snippets of information soaring through the air being captured by the scratching of hundreds of pens and pencils on paper, that he can only keep himself from imploding by funneling all of his focus into an icy stillness. Telling him to be at ease is like trying to convince the ocean to stop its infinite shifting and swelling and ebbing. He’s a force of nature that can’t be contained, yet few care to see the consequences of this beyond it being the root of his talent on the track. 

Here though, in the timeless shade of the sycamore, he is calm, almost languid. Yet his eyes are bright and attentive as a cat’s, watching as I trace yet another biological cycle for him, watching as I hover my pencil over the diagrams of some functional groups that he drew for retention as I check his handiwork. 

“Not bad,” I murmur, sliding the paper back to him after making a few corrections. 

Another thing is that he doesn’t take notes. At all. He sits through my cascades of explanations and scientific ramblings with that level feline gaze of his, yet he somehow almost impeccably absorbs everything that I throw at him. At first it was vexing, to think that I’m exhorting so much effort for him to only sit there and nod his head occasionally, but then he could recall such detailed facets of something after a single round of explanation that it more than impressed me.

“How do you not take notes and still remember pretty much everything I tell you?” I muse, suddenly itching to break the question.

He shrugs. He’s always shrugging, as if only the greater force of the universe can know what’s up with him. “I don’t know, they don’t really help me. As long as I hear something then I’ll know I’ll remember it,” he admits thoughtfully after a moment as he absently fiddles with the corner of the notebook paper. 

“Then how come lectures are a problem?” I think I already know the answer, but I need to know that my hypothesis is right. At one point I even humored myself by thinking that he already knows everything and that he only pretends not to as to spend time with me, but that would be absurd. 

He slides his eyes away from me, and finds a great amount of interest in an empty spot somewhere in the air. I’ve learned that he can talk and talk about just about anything, but when the topic shifts to him he always becomes a reserved, uncharacteristically timid echo of himself. 

“It’s just like … raw information, you know? I can’t remember something unless it’s somehow pieced together in a way that makes sense, like instead of there being A and B like it’s given in the lectures, you have B is related to A because it comes after A. And you just do it really well. The piecing together.”

I’m humbled and surprised by his answer; it’s fortunate that he’s still staring into space, since I feel a rosiness climb up my cheeks. I duck my head down just in time as he looks back, pretending to be busied with flipping through my notes. 

“I think we’ve pretty much covered a lot of things for today. Unless you want to go through transcription and translation again?” I say after a moment, my voice sounding a little high in my ears. 

“I think I’m fine, thank you,” he says.  
  
"Do you have practice today?” I ask lightly as I begin to gather and stuff all loose pieces of paper back into my notebook. I don’t know why, but looking at him feels difficult right now, like I would break some sort of spell if I do. I still feel a little off kilter after what he said, my heart giving little starts and jumps when I keep seeing his perfectly tan hands still fiddling with the paper. 

“Yeah,” he says, and maybe I’m just imagining it, but he sounds wearier than his usual jubilant self. I’m still thinking of what I could say when he adds, “You should come watch. We’re having practice relays today.”

I look up at him then, my mouth no doubt doing that awful fish-gape of mine. He looks at me nonchalantly, openly, with his chin casually propped up in the heel of his palm. I know, as I always know with him, that if I say no he’ll simply brush it off as quickly as a bird fluffs its feathers, that there will never be a poisonous hurt leaking off of him as it is so often with others. Yet inexplicably, his every request draws this feeling out of me that presides at the absolute bottom of some deep well within me, where saying anything but yes feels like it will splinter a piece off of my soul. 

“Alright,” I say. That smile edged with sunshine curling his lips up at my reply makes it all worth it as it is. Having a close view of his marshmallowy dimples is also an extra bonus. 

He hops from the bench in one swift movement, instantly activated into his prowling self. In just a flick of his hand he has all of his things crammed back into his bag and slung over his shoulder, while I’m still methodically zipping everything back up and making sure nothing is sandwiched in anything, as is the case when you lug around too many textbooks and notebooks at the same time. Once I’m done we’re off back across the green, back towards the track for the first time since the day that I first crossed the threshold into Oli’s direct awareness. Despite actually being befriended by him, I’ve still never found it in me to go back to watching him run, since it feels like seeing him back on the track would open again that rift of where he’s an untouchable god and I’m just a nugatory human worshiper, way below his appraisal. We’ve never even talked about that first awkward encounter — well, at least it was for me; I believe there is a fortunate chance that he might not even remember seeing me at the time, and to bring it up would make it all the more uncomfortable. Despite everything, there is an odd giddy feeling about me now that sort of makes my steps feel pleasantly light as we make our way across the grass. It runs so thoroughly through me that it even spurs me to be uncharacteristically the talkative one.

“Say, Oli, you never told me what your major is,” I say as the thought drifts into my head. I imagine he has to be doing something sciencey, since he is in bio; yet for some reason the subject seems somewhat incongruous with him.

“Kinesiology,” he says. 

I smile a little to myself as I hear it. Of course, how perfectly fitting for him to study the science of movement; to study the science of himself.

“Do you like it? Your major?” I ask, wanting, needing, to know more about him, to soak in every fact and nuance about his being, wanting to take the plunge now that I’ve already set one foot into the water. 

“It’s… alright,” he says, his voice hitching with a little uncertainty halfway through the thought. I know that hesitation, I know it all too well.

“Did your parents make you do it?” I ask, knowingly.

He laughs, light and airy, a sound like a dandelion puff being swept away in the wind. “How did you know?” He says, and I can only smile at his reply.

“I mean, it’s not as many people as you’d expect that get to choose what they want to study without any real influence. And I’m in the same place you are yourself — I know exactly what it feels like to have someone ask that question.” 

“You’re pre-med, right?” Oli asks, glancing at me with regard. 

“Yeah. My dad’s a doctor; I don’t think he could let me have it any other way, to be honest.” In my last year of high school, I had gone to the ring many times with my father on squabbling over what I should study. I think the real problem was that I really did not know myself what I wanted to study, but I was set on the one principle that I wanted to be anything but what my father wanted me to be, since in his eyes the only acceptable version of me that could exist is that perfect and unachievable twin of me that resides inside his head. I couldn’t tell Oli that, though, not yet — it still sounds ludicrous and pitiful to me as it is, especially since I found that pre-med was not half as bad as I thought it would be.

Catching Oli with that secretive little ephemeral smile of his brings me back to the moment, of our feet crunching softly in the grass.

“My dad said I wouldn’t be cut out to be a doctor, so I might as well study something that at least applies to me,” he says, and I feel an odd flicker of appreciation towards his dad, even though it’s somewhat belittling to tell your own kid that they can’t do something. At least he was honest; mine didn’t even stop to consider if I had the brains and the motivation to do it.

“My mom didn’t want me to go to college, though,” he suddenly adds, his voice a few shades lower, duller.

“What?” I say automatically, failing to stop the raw surprise from coloring my voice. 

“Yeah, I know.” There’s something of a wistful twist to his lips now, a dimness to the usual luminosity of his expression. “She wanted me to go professional. To run in the Olympics one day, for her country.”

“That’s, well … that’s amazing,” is all I can think to say. In my mind, though, it sounds so absurd, that someone can confidently set such high ambitions for their child — but at the same time, it also sounds absurd that he did not follow through on them. He’s at such an astronomical caliber as an athlete, outshining everyone at ASU at a level that cannot, and likely will not, be paralleled. Even without meaning to, I’ve come across local newspapers with his face and stats clipped at the front; I once accidentally tuned into a radio station that was rambling on about the best track and field athlete that Aegean State ever took on. So I can’t help it when the question wells up at the edge of my tongue, even though I know it’s against my better judgement to ask it.

“So why didn’t you?” It shames me to think that he’s had those four little words thrown at him so many times, and I’m just another one of those insensitive idiots doing it.

“Ah,” he says, and I know by his voice that he was expecting it. “The million dollar question.”

“You don’t have to answer it, if you don’t want to,” I hurriedly say, wishing I could backtrack and have held my mouth shut. We’ve also segued into one of the main walkways, and as always is the case with Oli, I could feel the curious eyes and ears gravitating towards us, a circle of vultures hungry for the scraps. 

“No, it’s alright,” he says with a shrug, “It’s not like it’s a secret.”

“But still,” I protest. He smiles at me in earnest at that, the dimples reappearing on his honey cheeks. 

“It’s better you hear it from me, as it is,” he says.

And the rest of the walk down to the track he tells me the story of how his mother used to run for Brazil, even winning the Olympics a couple of times (this makes me feel even more in awe of being in his presence, to think such prodigious blood runs through his veins, like one of those absurdly expensive Arabian racehorses). It also warmed me for some reason to know that that pleasant, chronically sun-kissed shade of his skin must have stemmed from her heritage, along with his carelessly curly hair, streaked with the bronze and gold of my imagined beaches of Brazil. 

Anyway, his father was some man of affluence that made the world his playground and enjoyed watching sports with long-legged, sparsely-dressed girls and occasionally inviting them to his yacht. What he exactly did to get to that life, I was not let in on that information, but he managed to get ahold of Oli’s mother at some photoshoot in Monaco or what other lavish European destination after thirsting for her all of an Olympics. It wasn’t until a marriage and a kid later that he came upon the undeniable fact that while she had all the appearance of a swan, she had the personality of a viper that was steadily constricting around his throat. After adequately feeding off of his wealth and status she had eventually cut and run with a pretty sum of money and a pretty little boy, but after having tasted a life of languid splendor, she could not bring herself to run professionally anymore. So she did what all parents do when they expire in ability — they pass the burden on to their children. 

“So it was too much at one point, with her, you know? And I’d say _mamãe, my feet are on fire,_ and she’d tell me it was because of those stupid shoes the sponsors made me wear, or that I was eating the wrong things or walking the wrong way, and that it was always just a few more meters, just another lap, but of course it was never the end with her.

“So then it got to the point I could hardly walk, and I went to the doctor and —” Oli makes a crunching sound, snapping his fingers —“so many stress fractures, it was a miracle that the bones in my feet did not all splinter apart, the doctor said. And it was my mother’s mistake, you see, taking me back to California for treatment, where my father was able to spirit me away from her. He did give me the choice to go back, but two months of laying in bed gave me time to think, and I could not fathom forcing myself to return back to something like that.” 

We’re standing right outside the entrance to the lockers, and already all of his teammates have streamed by, glancing at me with piqued curiosity before disappearing beyond the turquoise double doors. Yet Oli stands leaning against a pillar despite probably being late, his tale reverberating through me with this hollow, wrung out feeling like I was the one that lived and burned through his life of forceful mothers and removed fathers, of sacrificing my body to the greater god of sport. Yet I did not pretend to even imagine to know what it feels like to be him, the incandescent boy who only shines so brightly because of the darkness he’s been through.

A few moments of contemplative silence pass where I’m staring at his feet, stretched out in front of him under his straightened legs as he holds his back against the pillar, while I know he’s staring at me with that frank gaze of his, always waiting for my judgement. 

“Oli … I don’t even know what to say to that,” I say, still staring at his feet as if I could just make out the healed rivers of fissures within them. 

“That’s good, because people usually say the wrong things,” he replies, pushing off of the wall. He claps his hand on my shoulder, so I’m forced to look up, at his brown eyes soft on mine. It’s disconcerting to realize that we’re the same height, despite him seeming taller than me in every respect. 

“Thanks for everything today, Adrian. I mean it,” he says firmly, as I open my mouth to deflect. He drops his hand and smiles at me, dimples and all. “I’ll see you out by the track,” he says, before disappearing beyond the turquoise doors. He walks with his head held high, a miracle in disguise only known to me.


	4. Chapter 4

“Are you sure we’ve never met before?”

“Definitely not before college, I don’t think.”

“You’ve never lived in or been to SoCal before? Are you sure of that?”

“Well, yeah. I’ve lived on the east coast my whole life up until now. The farthest out west I’ve traveled was like to Denver or something.”

Oli lays back on the grass and contemplates this. 

“But I swear, I feel like I know you from somewhere. That’s why I came up to you in the first place in bio, because of all the smart people you seemed the most familiar to me.” 

I sit on the bench, absently tapping my pencil against my stale notes. It’s disconcerting to know that the inexplicable gut-deep familiarity I felt seeing him for the first time was somehow reciprocated. Where could I possibly have known him from before?

“I mean, I think you saw me by the track before, remember? I used to walk by there sometimes, earlier in the semester,” I admit at last. It’s a little nerve-wracking to reveal my initial obsession if he wasn’t already aware of it. My stomach twists into a knot as I hang over that empty precipice before his answer comes. My eyes burn into the same page of my textbook that I have been on for the past twenty minutes. 

“No, no. Even before that, I’m sure of it.” It’s hard not to look at him stretched out in the patch of clovers just under the tree, his hair mingling with the velvet green, his hand flashing through the air as he keeps indolently catching and releasing an apple just above his head. Somehow the admittance that he does remember me from my quiet stalks by the track does not even have such a jarring or emotional effect on me; the elysian portrait of him languidly lying in a perfect pool of violet shade hypnotizes me into the same sleepy calm as him. I have to fight the urge to go lay down beside him. He carries on though, distracting me from the thought. 

“It’s like,” he beings, elegantly twirling a hand through the air, “Do you ever see a person but you can’t place them, yet they’re so familiar to you it almost physically hurts your brain to think about how you might know them, it’s almost like ...” 

“Trying to remember a half-forgotten dream,” I supply. 

“Yes, exactly,” he exclaims, stabbing a finger into the air for emphasis. “Exactly like that. I also think reincarnation is real, you know? For all we know we could have been friends in another life, that we’re just two lost souls seeking the familiar.”

I’ve always been a firm believer of leaving it up to science to explain the mystical tides of the universe, but there’s always been a very powerful piece of my heart that desperately wants to give in fully and faithfully into the inexplicable magic hidden in our everyday lives. My mother was one of those people who could unquestionably believe in things like reincarnation; she was always delighted by the little anomalies in the world, like having a book fall straight open onto the page you were looking for, or knowing what song would come next on the radio without any preliminary announcements or hints. So sure, reincarnation. Why not give it the benefit of the doubt?

“But what if we were like, say, enemies, and our actual purpose for reincarnation was to get back at each other’s throats?” I muse as the entertaining thought slips across my mind. 

“Then we’re not doing a very good job of that, are we?” Oli says, and I can hear the smile in his words even though I can’t see his face from this angle. “But you know, seriously, I keep getting these really strange recurring dreams throughout my life, and it’s always like when I close my eyes at night, I open them and suddenly I’m like looking out through someone else’s eyes in a completely different world. And it always feels like I keep coming back to the same place and inhabiting the same person. I like to think that that’s just me slipping through the fragments of my past life or something.” He finishes talking for a moment and sighs. “Sounds crazy, I know.”

My mouth goes dry at his words. It doesn’t even strain my brain like with ordinary dreams to recall the ones that feel more a memory than a dream — the ones with that ever-present riddle of gold dancing just beyond the reach of my fingertips, of that far-removed calamitous place where there’s a wall that gnaws on the sky and a sea of a turquoise so saturated and glistening like diamonds that I would weep if I ever saw it in life. I think of how every time it feels like I’m trapped within the same body when I inhabit the realm of those dreams, of the acuteness of the sensations they bring that border on being memories. 

“What —”, I begin, and clear my throat when my voice comes out sounding faint and scratchy. “What do you dream about?” I manage to say, a little louder and steadier. 

“Well, there’s always this beautiful sea —”

He gets drowned out by the holler of a couple of his teammates, which are suddenly advancing towards us across the green at a damning speed.

“HEY MISTER OLIVER, TRAINING HAS BEEN MOVED TO A HALF HOUR EARLIER,” one of them shouts. They’re already almost within the shadow of the sycamore as the words finish ringing through the air.

“Oh, shit,” I hear Oli say, and in a heartbeat he’s off the ground and rummaging through his bag by the bench, disentangling his phone from his earphones and a headband as he fishes it out.

“Oh shit, they’re right,” I hear him murmur as I see him scroll through his notifications. His teammates are already upon us; one’s a reedy, auburn-haired boy that I’ve noticed is actually remarkably fast, even in respect to Oli, and the other one’s a little stockier but with muscles as chiseled as one of the Greek discus thrower statues, his legs pure cords below his track shorts. The latter looks cynically at me, which is really how half of his team does now that I’ve suddenly and inexplicably become a common installment to Oli’s lofty presence. 

“Enjoy your nap, princess?” The auburn-haired one says, but not menacingly.

“I was studying,” Oli replies coolly as he gathers his things and slings his bag onto a shoulder. 

“As if you ever do,” the other guy pips up. 

“Adrian here is tutoring me in biology, since you said I’m crap at it, Ian.” Oli motions to me, and now I have all three sets of eyes weighed on me like stones. It’s not emotionally easy being looked down at by the three haughty faces of some of the most popular people in the school. I’m still reeling from what Oli said before he was interrupted, the world around me feeling wobbly and faded as if I’m doped up on something. I try to keep my face normal and my movements steady as I stand up from the bench so that our gazes are at least level. 

“Pleasure to meet you two,” I say, inclining my head towards the pair of them and keeping my hands shoved pointedly in my pant pockets. I hope I look as calm and bored as I try to appear in my head, because god, I feel like throwing up.

“Oli, we really have to go,” Auburn Head says a hint nervously as he flashes his watch briefly up at his face. Honestly for that phrase alone I think I have decided to love him. 

“Coach’ll wait if he has to,” Oli says calmly as he reaches to clasp my hand in parting as he always does, which I obey to. “You’re welcome to come watch us if you want to, Adrian,” he says, and it thrills me out of my haze when he gives me a quick, dimpled smile. He drops my hand and starts away across the lawn in the direction of the track, not waiting for the two boys to follow. 

They don’t turn to leave right away, though.

“You’re an odd fellow, Adrian. But as long as you’re keeping Oli from getting kicked out because of his shit GPA, I guess we’ll tolerate you.” The redheaded boy makes it sound like I’m some sort of stray puppy he’s letting his son keep for the sake of his emotional stability, but I take it as some very basic form of acceptance into whatever inner track-athlete circle they have going on here. The other guy, Ian, continues to stare stonily at me, but he gives me a very slight nod before they both turn to hurry after Oli. 

Once they become turquoise-clad specks in the distance I sink down to sit in the soft grass by the trunk of the tree. Being around Oli with others, or even just being around him in general, always makes me feel electrified, as if I’m riding on the shoulder of a god. But every time he leaves it’s like he sucks away all of my giddiness with him, leaving me hollow and exhausted at times, his presence still echoing within that empty chasm inside of me. 

I close my eyes to the gentle susurrus of the leaves above me, my fingers digging into the feathery carpet, into the moist coolness of the soil below. I think about reaching to the roots below, to the roots within me.

_Well, there’s always this beautiful sea —_

— 

It didn’t take long for him to ask for my story, which seemed bland as bread in comparison to his. Yet he still adamantly insisted on hearing it despite my preludes to its glumness, and I felt like I owed it to him to show the ghosts trailing my wake when he so valiantly exposed his to me. So between our tutoring sessions, walks across the campus and athletics complex, and the occasional after-practice milkshake runs he snared me into to the diner just a short walk away into town, I steadily handed him the broken fragments of the ugly mosaic that made up my life. 

I told him how my father was from an old Maine family immigrated down to Connecticut. They were all about top-siders and pressed khaki with their straw boater hats; the framed faded photographs of washed-out men always surrounded by wood and water; the permanent salty aroma of clam chowder stewing on the stove. My mother, though, came from a completely different realm than their vintage tidiness — she had the incandescent glimmer of New York jazz in her eyes; bangles gold as pollen chiming on her wrists and the proud, straight, Ethiopian nose that made for a haughty silhouette in photographs, accentuated by her sensuous lips that were always curled into a secretive smile. She was made of light and air, her nature as delicate and weightless as a dragonfly skimming the water. I loved her very much, I made sure Oli knew that. Yet I could never say the same for my father.

“What happened?” He asked over a milkshake, chewing on the candy-cane striped paper straw as I told him how my parents became cataclysmic when kept under the same roof.

“She was really unhappy with him, which made him unhappy with her, and so they separated at first …” I take a sip of my chocolate milkshake, steeling myself for the next segment I have yet to tell him, the most unpleasant one by far.

“… but she got really into the drinking and pills at one point,” I pick back up again, the ickiness of the memory coloring my stomach. “And I knew it would never end well — it took her just once to hit the wrong combination and she was gone.” My words sound so simple and factual in my ears, as if I’m recounting anyone else’s life but my own, cutting straight through the emotion and pain and getting to the meat of it. But what it all was was really incommunicable unless you were there, to hear the domino clink of the bottles as they all fell in a line and shattered on the kitchen floor, the chemical candy bowl in its technicolor assortment and eyes glazed under a thick layer of honey, heavy and sticky. 

“It’s not fair,” Oli says, his milkshake abandoned and soupy as he’s netting his fingers under his chin, looking at me with darkened eyes. It’s the first time I’ve seen them storm like that, the sunlight extinguished by a formidable cloud layer, nowhere in sight. “It’s always the good people that go fatally rotten when they touch the other rotten fruit.” His voice is as solemn as I’ve ever heard it, with all of its playful flame utterly doused. 

“Look, Oli, it’s really not as dramatic as I make it out to be. I was like thirteen when it all happened.” Try nine. If I block out every sense and thought, I can still remember that mellifluous timber of her voice, a little raspy in the cabaret style. I still have a vial of the smoky vanilla perfume that she always wore, and when I was younger and would miss her so much that it made me double over sick, I’d spray some on my hands and lay curled in bed with my fingers clenched by my nose, going dizzy from its sweetness. 

It never did me well to dwell on her, but sometimes she’d circle into my mind at its most vulnerable moments like with those strange lucid dreams that leave me reeling for days. I never really told that many people about why such a vibrant spirit had come to be so quietly extinguished, slipping from this plane one night like smoke out the crack of a window. It always felt so intimate and almost holy to me, like letting the butterfly you kept in a jar finally fly free. 

Telling Oli though made it oddly bittersweet to me, because he wasn’t pitying like the rest; he was furious. Furious that I lost her so early, that she wasn’t loved as she should have been, that all beautiful things wilt too soon; touched by rot as he had put it. His reaction made me realize that I was proud to have known her in the time her spirit had graced the earth and brought mine along, that I was privileged to be among such divinity for however ephemeral it was. 

“I’m glad you told me,” he says, giving his milkshake a half-hearted stir. We sit quietly for a moment; him looking into his glass, me out of the scratched-up haze of the window at the parking lot, the incongruous mix of shiny suburbans and faded Fords the same muted shades of violet in the twilight. It’s a strangely peaceful, comfortable silence with the soft hum of the fluorescents above and the fragments of conversation drifting by, filling the lull between us. 

A movement at my periphery makes me turn, to see Oli suddenly grab the remnants of my milkshake. He dumps it into his, creating a mess of what looks like muddy snow. 

“What are you —” I begin, but he takes a sip which makes me cringe. The combination itself is not so gross per se, but something about really melted and lukewarm ice cream disagrees with some primal part of me. 

“Try it,” he says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and sliding me the soupy chocolate-vanilla monstrosity. 

“No,” I say, but for some reason I’m starting to laugh at the whole thing, a lightness filling my chest and bubbling upwards. “It’s too sweet for me.” I know it’s the dumbest argument ever, but I need to worm my way somehow out of this one.

He rolls his eyes, and the next thing I know he’s grabbing a saltshaker and dumping liberal amounts of salt into the milkshake.

“ _Noooo_ ,” I say horrified, as he slides the glass back to me.

“You said it was too sweet.” He’s giving me that cat’s smile, watching my shocked and slightly-offended gape down at the soiled drink. 

“That doesn’t mean you should put salt into it!” My words come out half-wail, half-uncontained giggle. He takes the glass and puts the straw to his lips.

“No! Don’t drink that!” Now I’m practically lounging across the table, trying to save myself from second-hand disgust. He bats my hands and protests away, swerving the cup gracefully out of my reach without spilling a drop. 

He looks me straight in the eyes with mischievous delight as he takes a long drag at it. I must look so genuinely horrified that he grins around the straw.

“Mmmmm. It’s so good, just missing the pepper.” He grabs the little pepper shaker and I have to look away as he dumps its contents in and gives the concoction a hearty stir.

“Honestly, Adrian, you’re missing out. It’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted,” he says joyfully as I peer at him from behind my fingers. The girls sitting in the booth right behind him are laughing, their eyes bright as they all look attentively at his back, the scrunchies in their hair catching the light as they coquettishly toss their heads. They want him to hear them, but all of his attention is on me as he smiles at me with his playful malevolence. 

“I’m taking it we’re not leaving until I try it,” I mumble as he sets the glass down.

“Not a chance.” His eyes are full of laughter; so alive and alight in this moment that I forget all about the somber air that clouded them just minutes before. He’s the best pain medicine, the drug that trips into utter euphoria, a cure that I feel I should carry around into the saddest and darkest corners of the world. But really, I think selfishly, I want him all for me. 

We’re at a stalemate that could last all night until I concede to defeat. One of the wondrous qualities of Oli is that if he wants something to happen, he’s going to make it happen. He sits with his hands folded patiently under his chin with that insufferable curl of his lips, only moving to shake a lock of curly hair that falls into his face, shining metallic in the stark light. 

I sigh, and with deliberate slowness and great drama slide the glass towards myself. I try to not look down into the peppery mudslide as I put my lips to the straw and take a sip.

“How is it?” He says it with mock seriousness, but I can see the laughter ready to burst through the dam of this lips.

I try to ignore how it wetly slides down, all the pepper in it making my throat itch. 

“Like joy,” I say, since it’s the only thing on my mind right now.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry if this chapter is kind of meh, it's more of a bridge chapter so it's just kind of there ... also I've gotten less sleep in the last three days than I usually get in one, so I'm sure that sorta shows here :p

It was inevitable that Levi would get antsy at one point with my prolonged time spent with Oli now, of either studying on the green or watching him openly on the track from the bleachers or just messing around in our free time wherever the wind blew us that day. Levi is just like one of those house plants that looks like it’s doing well even when you forget to water it, until it suddenly dies one day and you remember why you’re at fault. 

I came in late to my dorm room tonight after hanging out at Oli’s place; he lives in an apartment off-campus with a couple of other boys from track and a couple from the swim team. I helped him bullshit through a biology lab report for a lab that he did not do, and afterwards one of the swim boys had flipped through the TV channels and landed with great fortune on _Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban_. Oli had never come into contact with anything pertaining to Harry Potter before, but it did not take him long to start shouting spells back at the television and heartily waving a stray pen around. 

It was past midnight when I dragged myself back to nearly the opposite end of the campus, and when I came in Levi was hunched over a textbook. I asked him to take a glance at his calculus homework, a request he usually graciously approved. Now though he keeps his back firmly to me as his pencil continues to scratch across his notebook, unbothered.

“Maybe you should ask your new best friend,” he says quietly to me, not even looking up from his studying. 

“Too bad he isn’t in the same calculus class as you and me,” I say calmly, but my fingers freeze on my jacket as I begin to take it off. 

“And I wonder why that is,” he mutters from under his breath, but I’m already standing over his desk as the last word leaves his mouth.

“Levi, what the hell is your problem?” I hiss, reaching over to grab the folder that I know he keeps his calculus homework in. He slaps his hand on top of the folder before I have the chance to get it, which is possibly the fastest and most aggressive move I have ever seen his lethargic body make. 

“No, what the hell is your problem, Adrian?” Now he’s finally turning in his chair to glare up at me through his wireframes. I’ve honestly never seen him so incited; it’s a little unsettling to see such a deviation from his mild temperament. I’d be concerned if I wasn’t close to boiling over on the inside. 

“What do you mean?” I say, but I know it’s useless to ask. I’m the idiot who forgot to water the shriveled up plant. 

“I don’t know if I misread things with you, or whatever, but I thought that we were friends and that we at least respected each other. But it’s not cool to waltz up to me every night wanting to copy this or that because you were out doing whatever with your friend while you know I was in the library for hours getting this crap done.” 

“Oh, come on, that was like what? Two times before?” I don’t know why I’m getting into this fight, with Levi of all people. I should shut my mouth and go to bed before I start a full-out war with the person who sleeps less that six feet away from me. 

“He’s taught you to use people, just as he’s doing it to you.” Levi’s eyes behind his glasses are defiant and ruthless, two granite stones sinking me down to the bottom of the lake. My hands are pressed down at the edge of Levi’s desk, my knuckles nearly going pale between the dark skin of my fingers. I see my hands as if through someone else’s eyes, my mind detaching from my body for a moment. 

“He’s. Not. Using. Me.” Each word is a hiss between my teeth, staining my tongue bitter. I try to focus on my hands and not Levi’s face, because if I don’t then the two might just end up meeting each other. 

“And what will happen once this semester ends and you don’t have any of the same classes anymore?” I hate how level his voice is when he says it; cold and precise, just like he queries during the calculus lectures. My lungs give that painful jolt of hitting the water wrong off of the jump; my stomach feels hollowed out, a sinkhole opening beneath my feet. I push off of Levi’s desk and take a few turbulent steps across the room to my own desk, throwing my jacket at my bed midway and miscalculating and hitting a lamp instead. 

I tear my bag open in a violent jerk, getting my calculus textbook and notes and tossing them on the table in a flurry of paper, upsetting a few pencils into rolling off of the desk. I hastily grab one off the floor and open my calculus homework, but my hand shakes slightly as it hovers over a line of incomprehensible symbols and numbers, a painful inky blur in my eyes. My head is full of white noise, a siren that screams disaster through the night.

It was the announcement of upcoming midterms that did it first, a tangible mark to a semester half-vanished into the past. We both knew we would have no overlapping classes in the spring; bio was just an intersecting point in our lines of study. Spring was track season too, and he would be gone for days at a time; sleeping in the back of a noisy van rolling across the state, soaring thousands of feet through the air with the thought of me bound to the ground rushing away below. There was a crescendoing panic in me, a voice in my head that whispered come next year, it would all have been like a fevered dream. 

I close my eyes, feeling the rosy glow of the lamp against my eyelids. He is so much like a dream, so dynamic and vivacious, flitting through this world without being quite grounded. I keep waiting for it to end, as suddenly and violently as those raw dreams I get — the memories but not really memories, always holding me on the tripping brink of lucidity. 

I slam my calculus textbook shut, my hand already reaching blindly for my phone. I’m out of my screeching chair and slipping out of the door, my mind so many millions of miles away, untethered. 

I go and sit in the stairway reserved for fires, which is a strangely comforting place with its chalky scent and soft echos and dusty windowpanes reflecting the muted light of the faded lightbulbs. It’s getting cold at night and I should’ve brought my jacket, but the brisk air feels pleasant, running its invigorating fingers down the bare stretches of my skin. I pull out my phone, staring blankly at its screen for a few minutes as if awaiting a command, but then the muscle memory of my fingers seem carry me where I’ve been needing to go all along.

It’s past one in the morning and really I should text first, but I’m calling him before I make sense of it, my cold fingers grasping my phone up to my ear as I lean sitting against the grey wall, folding myself across one of the frigid concrete steps.

I hear the other end of the line click on, my heart doing a little somersault in my chest. “Hey,” I say softly into the phone, my voice bouncing emptily down the stairwell. 

“Hey,” Oli says back, and I can tell he’s sleepy by the faraway, feathery quality to his voice. I suddenly feel guilty I’ve woken him, my face burning with stupidity even though there is no one there to see it. 

“I’m sorry, did I wake you up?” I’m already mentally kicking myself. He probably has gym or something in the early morning, and the last thing he needs is his overly-attached study-friend ringing him up in the middle of the night. 

There’s a pause, in which I can hear a soft rustling that is probably his bedsheets, the crinkle of a pillow. His voice comes back through the phone a moment after, still a little muffled but without a trace of annoyance. 

“I don’t know. I wasn’t really sleeping.” He says, his words unspooling through the line like one long sigh. “Did you get your homework done?”

I lean my forehead against my knees. “Maybe. No. I don’t know. I can’t focus.” I say, scrunching my eyes shut in my frustration. I can’t deny the fact that ever since I started being around him, like on a daily basis, my grades had sloped a little, my productivity going down the drain. I used to bury my head in thoughts of chemical reactions and derivatives and the theories of evolution out of sheer boredom for life beyond the textbook, but now I feel awakened to the world, a captive of Medusa broken free of stone. I could never tell him though, out of self-preservation, how the A’s have begun to slip to B’s, because I know that he cares enough to be able to pull away. 

“Ah. I know that feeling all too well,” he says, and I imagine I can hear the knowing smile in his words. “And I think I’ve realized why I can’t sleep. It’s that damn movie. The Harry Potter one.” 

Well this catches me off guard. I lift my head off of my knees and lean it against the cold concrete of the wall, feeling my lips stretch into something silly.

“What about it?” I whisper into the phone, my own voice feeling a few shades warmer than before.

“Like, I want to know what happens, because we were kind of left with a cliffhanger, you know?” His words take on a curious fervor, all the cobwebs of failed sleep being shaken off.

“Well, you literally did watch a movie that is basically in the middle of the series.”

“Yeah, I know, but still. I’m like emotionally invested in it now. Like what happens to Sirius after he flies off on that bird-llama thing? Do Hermione and Harry like get together? They seemed kind of close, you know? Had some chemistry going there at the end?”

“Oh, god no,” I laugh, the sound ricocheting off of the shadowed walls into an eerie pitch. 

“Then tell me what happens. I don’t think I can sit through another three-hour long movie.”

“What, you want me to tell you the whole plot of _Goblet of Fire_?”

“Is that what the next one is called? Why not. It might help clear your mind to you know, study.” 

I take a deep breath, racking my mind for the plot of the fourth installment of the Harry Potter series, knowing that I’m smiling like an idiot.

“Well, you know how everyone mentions that bad guy, Voldemort? Well, he’s about to make a comeback …” 

And so it goes, my whispered words slipping into the void of the receiver, until they are occasionally met by Oli’s commentary, cutting through the static like bursts of color. My body forgets its shivering, my mind forgets what anger and despair feel like, melting with every word that thaws from my lips. I don’t know how many minutes or hours pass, but I feel both of us slip into a comforting tiredness — my fragmented sentences become sloppy and a little delirious, his voice becomes sticky and warm with sleep like melted ice cream. I finally finish, with half of the details missing, a thousand plot holes gaping open due to my own negligence. We sit in silence for a minute, our breaths mingling softly over the radio waves of our phones. 

“Hey Oli?” I say at last, my voice a hoarse whisper from so many words said, from a fatigue that scratches at my throat like sandpaper. 

“Yeah?” His reply is marshmallow-soft, a brief reminder of his dimples skittering through my weary mind. 

“Do you think we’ll still have this, next semester?”

“Don’t ask stupid questions, Adrian. Goodnight.” 

— 

Oli still leaves, though, but it’s not as dramatic an event as my porcelain mind makes it out to be — the sky doesn’t collapse overhead, the sun doesn’t stop shining. Trying to pinch myself awake doesn’t throw me from this reality to another, much to my relief. 

He leaves for just a week to a pre-season thing just a couple of hours south from here. I use my notes from biology lecture as an excuse to text him, but most of the time he beats me to it. He texts me relentlessly during lulls of activity at the track, just a barrage of everyday niceties: the weather, some fuss between two teammates, an account of the broken vending machine at the hotel that stole his dollar. 

My hand constantly itches for my phone during classes now, my eyes lighting on the rectangle of illumination that teases me through the thin fabric of my bag every time there’s a new message. Levi’s not there anymore to hiss at me for slipping my phone out during lecture; he’s migrated a row forward, likely to get me out of his direct field of vision. The small crowd that naturally flocked to Oli once he came to sit by me likely contributed to the uprooting of Levi from my other side. He seemed to tolerate them with dramatic sighs every time someone from behind made a particularly witless comment, but after that disagreeable night he seemed to have decided to cross one bridge and burn the one behind. Even with the absence of Oli and the rift of two vacant seats beside me, I feel them all hover at my periphery, buzzing with the empty static of a radio lacking signal, clinging to the electrifying charge of Oli having long dissipated from the air. 

I think it’s the lack of his flamboyant presence beside me that I first notice the weight of someone’s eyes smoldering a hole through my head. It’s a very unsettling sort of attention, almost biting in its intensity — making me fidget with my pen, my neck feeling like it’s being licked by flames. 

I feel her coming every time by the cloud of nectar-sweet perfume that enshrouds her, the cold click of her acrylic nails across the screen of her phone. The murmur of a silky voice that slips down my spine like fresh snow. She’s very beautiful, imperious; a wrathful divinity thrown from the heavens. Electric-blonde hair straight as a knife’s edge, a face like cold cut marble, refracting the light of many glances. 

Her scalding yet hypnotizing presence is fitful, though — she arrives in the intermission between two lectures, briefly weighing her attention on me, then rising to leave the second that the professor’s folder slaps down on the lecture stand.

It’s Oli who is able to decipher her enigmatic air for me, the first day he is back.

“Who is it?” I say quietly to him, infinitesimally tilting my head towards the girl’s direction.

He ducks his head a little, his smile cold and a little strained as he tells me under his breath. “Allura,” he names her, like he would say _poison_ or _knife_.

As if on cue, she enters stage right, leaning forward from behind our seats. 

“Oliver,” Allura says, her voice slippery like a velvet ribbon. “It’s been a long time.” Even her breath from close beside me is like peaches and dew.

“Hey, Lur. I didn’t know you were in this class,” Oli says pleasantly, but I feel every cell in his being ringing with fabrication. 

“Oh, I pop in here and there. I just wanted to say hi, and, well, _congratulations_ , of course, for committing to ASU, since I never got to say it earlier.” She waves a pink-taloned hand nonchalantly between us, and I have to lean my head away a little to avoid being scratched on the cheek. There’s something coiled behind her easy words that gives me a strange feeling, and I catch myself watching Oli’s face to gauge for any ripples of expression. 

His face is frozen with bland amiability, his manner unfailingly unctuous when he speaks to her. “Thank you, I appreciate it.” His smile all glimmer, no authenticity.

“We should do something together soon,” she says, smiling coyly. “You know, dinner or something. Come to one of Fletcher’s parties with me.” Her long lashes flutter across her cheeks like hummingbird wings. 

“We’ll see. I have a lot going on right now, but thanks for the offer,” Oli says. It thrills me to see how easily he slips around her magnetization, like an antelope outwitting a lion — he’s the only one in the vicinity who is not staring at her with the dumbstruck expression of a caught fish, and he’s in the very epicenter of the blast. 

Allura opens her pretty pink mouth to speak, but Oli sleekly cuts her off. “It was really nice to see you, like really, it’s been a long time — but my class is starting.” I see his eyes dart to the doors slamming behind the professor with the relief of a man stranded in the ocean, finally seeing a boat. It’s a tough dismissal to swallow, but it takes more than that to wound a viper. 

“Oh, of course. It was so great talking to you, let’s surely catch up later,” she says without missing a beat, her voice frosted as gingerbread. She gracefully withdraws from our space in a swirl of saccharine perfume, not sparing a single glance at me the whole time, neither now or before. I feel her slip her way through the row behind us without even craning my head back; it’s the tangible ripple of attention that clings to her like a mist, the hassle of everyone shifting out of the way with a fear akin to brushing up against a work of art. 

The lecture begins and neither of us are paying attention — Oli is staring into thin air; I’m trying to catch subtle glances of him, trying to read him. He happens to finally look over at me for a moment, his eyes as far as the moon. I take the opening to reel him back to earth, mouthing at him, _who is she?_

He takes my notebook and writes at the top of one of the pages, before sliding it back over to me. _We went to high school together in my last year._

I can feel that each word is a tenth, a hundredth, a thousandth of the entirety of it, but I take it as it is. 

_She’s a charmer_ , I write, handing it back to him.

 _Don’t get me started_. I would laugh, but by the slant of his face I can tell he’s gone again — he has that distant look of someone staring at the stars, trying to keep from slipping into that enticing void between the spots of light.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so I've been writing really on and off because of school and it took a lot of strength to finish this chapter off, but here we are. all of your support really keeps me going so thank you thank you thank you <3  
> also, on a side note, bonus points to you if you know who Allura _really_ is, if you catch my drift. I'm not a fan of her but I'm oddly really enjoying writing her character.

“Allura’s making me go watch a movie with her,” Oli says, grabbing a random jacket from the one of many chucked across a pockmarked armchair. He shrugs it on as we leave his shared apartment, the white stitching _ASU Mens Swimming_ glowing faintly in the low light against the turquoise fabric of the jacket. 

“Good for you,” I say dryly over the sound of our feet clapping down the stairs. “At least she can’t, like, talk to you during a movie.” 

Oli laughs, but the sound is just as arid as my words. We start walking towards the general direction of the campus, with me heading back towards the dorms and Oli trying to catch the bus into town. Twilight is just fading out into the deep, oceanic blue that comes before the steep drop into depthless night. I’ve always loved the silvery-blue monochrome of this time of day, even more so when I saw Oli for the first time painted in these colors, right after we left his favorite milkshake diner one evening. There were a few minutes where he appeared gilded; godly. It was like he was shrouded in a shimmering, quicksilver aura — his curly hair appearing metallic, his skin pale and smooth as molded clay. He reminded me of something, like a painting I’d seen and forgotten, or the haunting memory of a photograph lost to the tides of time, of diaphanous faces staring back from an era away. 

We’re at the bus stop, deserted and devoid of movement except for the fluttering fliers stapled to a post, looking ghostly in the heavy aquamarine light. I spend a few minutes with him waiting around on the lonely bench, convincing myself that I just feel bad about leaving him all alone in this echoing blue. 

“You should come with me,” he says suddenly out of the quiet, startling me out of my mindless shoe-scuffing against the pavement. 

I look up at him, but he’s staring out into the street, contemplative. “To the movie theater?” I ask dubiously. 

“Yeah,” he says, his voice far off, like his mind’s in a different room. 

“Didn’t Allura invite you specifically?” I say carefully. I have this feeling every time I talk about her to Oli like I’m trying to fill water to the brim of a cup, playing with the dangerous edge of spilling over. I’ve learned there’s a shadow of something to everything that happens between them, from his tight nods and her sugary _hellos_ that have been going on in the past week. 

“Yeah, yeah. You’re probably right.” He mindlessly checks his phone, seeing but not seeing based on his expression — a move I’ve come to know as his way to think. Another minute passes, and I think I hear the rumble of the bus in the distance. For the first time in a while, I get the desire to leave him alone —this Oli is as shifting as the ocean, my mind whispering to give him space or else risk being sucked into the riptide. Even though I feel sick with myself I rise to leave — because that is the broad face of the bus rolling towards us — while muttering a parting word that feels damning on my lips. 

“Adrian, I’m sure it’ll be alright. You should still come.” 

I turn back towards him, hearing the hasty decision in his words, the tinge of desperation that I know has the word _please_ tied at the end. The bus hisses as it rolls up and comes to a stop, the doors screeching open to flood us with its sickly white light.

I scrunch my eyes under my glasses with my fingers, a move I’ve come to know as my way to think. I sigh and rock back a little on my heels, wishing I could let myself fall all the way back and disappear through a crevice in our dimension. 

“Alright,” I say. The word just leaves my mouth and a smile is already cracking open across his face like ice under the sun. “I haven’t been to the movies in a while,” I add, more for myself than anything. 

“It’ll be _fun_. We just have to pick something really grimy with preferably a lot of guns and cars and all the things Allura doesn’t like.” We sit down at the very back of the bus in a shadowy yet fluorescent-tinged corner, the AC howling overhead without much chill to its musty breath. We’re the only people on the bus besides a kid in headphones and a baggy ASU hoodie who sits broodily closer to the front of the bus. It’s at the precipice of my tongue, the question that’s been hanging at the front of my mind all week — what flute is Allura playing to have Oli so governed by her charm, to the notes he knows are so poisonous yet he sways to them still? 

I want to ask; the need burns more and more steadily in my chest like a greedy fire licking up my lungs. Yet when I look over at Oli beside me, his side-profile carved starkly against the pale light contrasting with a softness to his mouth and eyes that has returned for the first time in days, I simply can’t. The words get lodged in my throat, guttering out to nothing the longer I think about doing anything to prologue that crinkle of joy in his eyes, the easy half-smile curving his mouth.

I look out into the fleeting twilight beyond the window, knowing that if I stare at him any longer, I’ll eventually forget how to breathe. 

— 

Allura’s already waiting at the front of the theater entrance when we arrive, ethereal as a passing-by actress from one of the movie posters glowing along the walls. All eyes on the street are magnetized to her — she does make a startling and irresistible figure, with her high-heeled boots and the mile-long skinny jeans, hair glacial as the moon and lips the deep red of a rose. When she looks at us everyone else simultaneously looks away, the rippling of glances as tangible as the bite of pre-winter chill in the air. 

The moment she spots me trailing half a step behind Oli strikes as harshly across her face as lightning. Her eyes light up in the apocalyptic white flash of a thunderstorm, illuminating the calamity of the night for a few seconds before fading back into the velvet black calm. Her mouth forms the shape of _oh_ , but Oli lays down his words before she gets the chance to flip her own over. 

“I hope you don’t mind that we’re a few minutes late,” he says coolly, and now I wonder if our slow pace from the bus stop along the rows of shop window displays down the street was deliberate. She almost bristles, but I can see how she swallows the instinct behind her frosty smile. 

“I didn’t know you’d be bringing someone,” she replies, her words slippery as black ice. 

“Ah, I must have forgotten to tell you. Surely you know Adrian, though? He’s been helping me out with my classes.” Oli shuffles just a little to the side so that I’m in her direct line of vision, and honestly I think this might be the biggest betrayal he has ever pulled on me.

“Nice to meet you, Adrian.” Her words are knives clothed in silk, and the way she says my name makes my skin prickle like the merciless draft of winter air through a crevice. I desperately wish I wasn’t here, caught between two predators in the savannah — yet I decide that I’m only doing this for Oli, to keep him sane as the lioness circles tighter and tighter around him. 

We make our way to the box office, which has fortunately thinned out in the last few minutes. Oli briskly cuts in front of me and Allura, already naming a movie to the cashier and sliding over his credit card at a speed that could only mean his choice was arbitrary. He steps back and hands me one of the tickets, and I automatically begin to search my pockets for the spare money I carry around.

“No, no. I owe you more than one for all the tutoring you’ve been doing,” he says, stepping away with his hands shoved pointedly into the pockets of his jacket. 

“You really don’t have to,” I say meekly, already knowing there’s no way of fighting an Oli who’s as adamant as this. I’m about to say something else, but I get distracted by the sudden shift of charge in the air — it’s Allura sliding her card slowly across the counter, so that the whisper of the plastic against the marble is a drawn-out howl in the sudden silence that ensues. I almost jump to give her my ticket and pay for my own, the realization behind Oli’s little game making my gut twist in an unpleasant way. He’s playing with fire, but I’m not sure he realizes that there’s a possibility that I’m the one that’s going to get burnt. 

“Shall we go in?” Her words are clipped and sharp as the click of her wallet clutch shutting. She doesn’t wait for our assent before she wrenches open the door to the theater and storms in, the heels of her boots pounding with a force to crack the ground. 

_What the hell?_ I mouth to Oli as we move to follow her, since he looks over at me with a coloring of glee across his face. 

He simply shrugs, and that sends a shock-wave of anger through me that quickly passes only because it’s Oli, yet not without leaving its scorching impression. Somehow I’ve been forced to stumble into a war without having a side, simply getting tossed around in the violence of the fray. I wonder if we’re even going to make it to watching the movie, since Allura briskly cuts by the line for popcorn and drinks, making a straight dash for the restrooms.

“Hey, Lur, you want some popcorn?” Oli calls out after her half-heartedly. He shrugs again as she keeps indifferently walking away from us, her back rod-straight and nearly quivering. “Ah, she must be too far to hear me.”

“We better get her something,” I say, the words coming through my teeth. I don’t think Oli notices, though; he seems happily oblivious to everyone’s calamitous moods tonight. 

“Honestly, with a body like hers I don’t think she even eats it. She’ll probably get upset or something if we buy her some.” 

I have to physically keep my mouth shut to stop from pointing out that I don’t think it’s possible for her to get any more upset than she already is. We end up buying three popcorns anyway, even though I try paying at least for mine to only get my hand slapped away from the cashier. 

She drifts back to us just as we leave the counter with the bags, composed as can be with a keen and calm face, the blood-red line of her mouth straight but not wrathful. I hand her one of the bags of popcorn, and she thanks me with a pleasant roll to her words — yet Oli is right about her attitude towards the snack: her distaste cannot be concealed in the way she holds it away from herself, like something toxic and ill-bringing. 

Despite her clear apathy towards the gesture, the tension seems to melt just a little — she even makes a few remarks on the movie we’re going to watch as we enter the softly-illuminated theater. It happens to be the latest _Mad Max_ , all guns and cars as Oli promised, but apparently there is an actress in it that Allura favors which makes it a little bit less of a disagreeable choice. Oli ravishes his popcorn before the movie even starts at a speed that can only be accomplished by a starved athlete, while Allura listlessly plays with a kernel, letting the untouched mass grow cold in her lap. I basically had to force Oli to sit between us; something I accomplished by squeezing my way into the row before him and making sure to kick up my feet on the chair in front of me the second I sat down. He looked a little bewilderedly at me, but I’m pretty sure the twist of my mouth made my retribution evident for his attempt to make me the buffer between him and Allura again.

The movie is as raucous and stimulating as I would imagine it to be, but despite all the noise and overwhelming visuals, Oli manages to keep up a whispered commentary beside me the whole time. He whistles at the explosions and swears at the deaths and laughs softly at the narrow escapes, making me glance around anxiously each time he opens his mouth to gauge the irritation of the surrounding people. 

Allura impressively maintains the face of attentiveness; she sits with her hands folded neatly in her lap, her legs crossed over as the popcorn has been subtly allocated to the ground. She looks like she’s sitting in a mandatory lecture, politely listening while she counts down the seconds to the end. She doesn’t react to Oli’s constant stream of reactions, but sometimes I catch the way she tosses her head a little like trying to subtly avoid a persistent fly. 

I keep waiting for her to rise and leave sulkily at any second, but she manages to last until the very end through the exhausting blur of endless car chases and explosions.

“That wasn’t all that bad,” she says as the credits roll, her voice sounding lyrical after all of the cacophony of the film. 

Oli looks vaguely surprised at her comment, even a tone of disappointment coloring his face. “It could have been better,” he says slowly, although I know he had thoroughly enjoyed the movie. Allura glances quizzically at him, and again I’m reminded of how I’ve been made spectator to a game without being let in on the rules.

Now we’re outside, and the temperature has truly plummeted — the climate here is mild compared to the unforgiving bite of east coast cold, but it pleases me to soak up the familiar wash of chilly night air, exhilarating and infinite in the dark. We all stand in a loose circle under the buttery light of one of the street lamps, waiting — for what, I don’t know. All I can think about is how the glow of the theater entrance a little ways away behind Oli makes the frizzed out curls of his hair form a halo above his shadowed face. 

“Are you taking the bus back?” Allura finally asks, and I realize this is why we’re standing awkwardly clustered together — Allura’s waiting for us to make a move on, while Oli is trying to remain strictly apathetic. He looks over at me just as I expect him to — when did we get to the point where we’re reading each other just by way of fleeting glances?

“Yeah, but we’re going on a different line than you,” he says. He looks down at his watch, but I’m not sure he can read much of its analog face in the almost-dark. “We’ve just missed it.”

Allura flutters her sweeping lashes. “Right, then. I’ll see you soon?” Her words are meant to sound sweet, but there’s a hard edge to them that’s barely discernible — all dark chocolate with that bite of bitterness. 

“I can imagine so,” he says, and I can just see the outline of a tired smile draw across his mouth. She returns in kind, her lips a wine-red crescent in the shadows. Allura then turns to go, gracefully stepping around me before she sweeps out of the bloom of faint lamplight. 

“Shouldn’t we, like, go with her just in case?” I say after a moment, the click of her boots against the pavement growing fainter down the sidewalk.

Oli sighs. “Whoever might be out there would soon find that they should be more afraid of her,” he says quietly, which draws out a soft laugh from me.

We start to meander down the sidewalk towards the general direction of the bus stop as well, and even though it must be relatively late, neither of us can bring ourselves to feel rushed to get to anywhere. I half-wonder for a moment if he was telling the truth about missing our bus line. 

“She likes you quite a lot, doesn’t she?” I say after a moment. I know I should leave the whole topic alone, especially since Oli looks as worn-out as I’ve ever seen him — yet I’m just as tired from a whole week and a night of watching their strange little dance around each other. There’s an inexplicable urgency in me to understand everything, a persistent hunger that I didn’t even know dwelled within me. 

“Who? Allura?” He says faintly, his words coming from the depths of the ocean where his mind now swims. Even though his far-away moods are never amusing, I’ve come to like the way he talks when he’s not quite there — his vowels becoming rounded by a little bit of that Southern California flatness always hovering at the edge of his voice, sometimes an unusual softness creeping in that I like to imagine comes from his Portuguese. 

“Yeah,” I say, not really looking at him. 

He shrugs, always that simple shrug that could speak a hundred words. “People have the right to like whoever they want to.”

“I think she like _likes_ you, though. In a serious way.”

“So?” The word comes a little sharper; I can feel that I’ve reeled him a little back up towards the surface.

I make an indeterminate gesture with my hands, trying to encapsulate the whole mess of relationships. I keep feeling like I’m dancing closer to the dangerous edge of something, but it’s still too dark to know where the ground gives way to the plummet. 

“Look, we went to our high school senior prom together. And now she makes it out to be like it meant something way more than it ever was.” The way he says it rings a strange chord in his voice, fragile and unfamiliar to me. I look sideways at him, unable to stop myself. 

“Have you ever had a girlfriend, Oli?” I ask. It’s definitely prying of the worst kind, making my own cheeks burn as I say it. But there’s something in me tonight that desperately craves to explore this shadowed side of him, to see the darker side of the luminous moon. 

He blows out a breath that sounds half a wince, half a chuckle. “I haven’t really had the time for that.” 

“But surely you do now,” I insist. “We’re in college. The world is full of possibilities,” I say grandly, opening my hands skyward.

He stops his aimless walk and turns to me. I pause a few feet ahead of him — now surely I must have stepped over the precipice. My breath gets twisted in my lungs as I wait for my doom. 

“Adrian, I mean this in like the nicest way possible, but can we really not?” He sounds so pained, almost apologetic — a wildfire of shame spreads across my chest and consumes me. Who am I to try to kick answers out of him like that — when I’ve known him for maybe just a couple of months, when I’m absolutely no one compared to him, just a star trying to compete with the radiance of the sun? I was so afraid that I would get hurt from the neglect of not knowing, that I’ve managed to hurt him instead into knowing. 

I feel how he’s looking straight at me, his gaze heavy and searching from even a few feet of night away. I keep my eyes set on the distant glow of a streetlamp, the fuzzy edges of the light blurring and bleeding from the intensity of my stare. I can’t bare to look at him — I open my mouth to say something, anything; but only the smoke of silence trails out, choking me from trying to form a single word.

“We’ll miss our ride,” I hear him say softly after a minute, barely above the rustle of leaves in the breezy gutter. His shoes scuff quietly against the ground as he walks past me, the lonely, muffled sound striking me as having the lilt of something sour — disappointment. I follow a step after him, anything I could think of saying expiring before it even reaches my tongue.

For the first time, we sit with a gulf of depthless silence; a drowning void between us.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy shet, you guys. It is almost 5am and I ground this out overnight. wow. Tomorrow is going to be rough as hell, but honestly it was worth it. Literally got chills writing a part of this, which is something really rare when I write. I hope once more that it's not too evident this was written in the depths of the night, but if it is, well, just know I only really write anything decent from the hours of 11pm to 5am :)

_Again and again. Red and white and gold blooms from my stomach, ribbons of my life spilling before the piercing spear tip, striking the soul from my body like a viper claiming its prey. All I know in this moment is agony and longing — longing for the gold-touched boy still sticky in my mind as the blood of my weeping hands and stomach, longing to cling to the light of his being as I fall back into the dark abyss of nothingness._

— 

_He slips from my fingers like the cold sand of the sea, there and gone in the night, swept away with the icy moonlight. Dust-beaten grass and groves of olive trees, boys with skin glistening like amber in the honeyed sunlight — the world around me remains a muted gold but with its luminescence missing; for which I search for with the fervency of Demeter scouring the earth for the spirited away Persephone. I wander, transient and aimless, an echo of myself, until my eyes drag like heavy stones to the sea._

— 

_The waves carry me to a spit of chalk in the vast glistening turquoise, where he comes to me in a flurry of white silk and clinking gold, his soft hands fluttering to mine like hummingbirds to a flower. Finding him is indescribable, divine; it is a feeling reverberating only at the depths of your soul, in the most sensitive chasm of your being. It is feeling the rays of the rising sun kissing your skin after an endless night; it is seeing the first haunting silhouette of land after being lost at sea; it is hearing the first splinter of ice in the river after a long, ruthless winter. For a moment we have the world laid at our feet, for we are golden; two halves of a heart stitched together, two fragments of a soul poured into one between our fingers. Yet there is a darkness that lingers at the periphery, curdling the air with the bitterness of reality — it is an angular face and sharp dark eyes, hair black as ink catching the light and two pretty wrists flitting in the air as she dances in a circle tighter and tighter around us._

— 

Ever since last week, the unpleasant stickiness of that night at the theater still clung to my fingertips, like a resin too stubborn to wash off. The days since have been disorienting, blurring into a single point to where I’ve realized I’ve somehow ended up in a new territory without consciously registering my steps to getting there. It’s a feeling I would imagine that comes with the delirious rush of voyaging across the sea, of falling asleep to one shore and waking up to a completely unfamiliar land, every stroke of the foreign coast too jagged for the raw eyes to comprehend. 

It was the shore of Oli that changed for me almost overnight; or more exactly in the days where we seemed to almost naturally flow apart, following that conversation that pulled at a loose thread that turned into a tear between us. I took the hint and backed off, diving into my studies with a forgotten zeal; all hands jittery from caffeine, the ink of my scribbled solutions to the tedious stoichiometry calculations blurring into rivers at 3am. When I remerge days later, my mind heavy with strange dreams and my eyes still swimming with numbers and chemical equations, it’s like I’ve stepped into some kind of twisted, parallel universe.

I spot them first during the midday rush between classes. It’s hard not to, they attract such a crowd — like a fascinating carcass left in the wild, all the curious buzzards swirling above. 

In a break in the bulwark of people surrounding them, I see the two of them together, side by side. My gaze must radiate such confoundment that she looks straight at me — her eyelashes fluttering like butterfly wings, the smile of a curved blade climbing her cheeks as she tightens one tanned arm around his, a viper guarding its bounty. I should look away, but I can’t; for the first time in a long while I pray, straight from the heart, that he will tilt his head my way, only to recognize that I’m there. That his eyes will catch the light, not only of the sun but of some lambent source within, and he would already be across the ocean of people, already talking and smiling at the words that have not even left my mouth. But he stares straight ahead, the perfect line of his proud nose not even shifting in profile; his airy curls teasing in the breeze in such a way that makes me think he will turn at any second. But he doesn’t.

Allura turns back to him and puts her candy-red lips to his ear, saying something that makes him cock his head but not shift his attention completely. Again, the movement jars me, tripping me into thinking that he’ll glance my way — but the froth of people swallows them at that moment, and he’s gone, spirited away to the underworld. 

“Didn’t I tell you that he’d get tired of you?” Levi says beside me. I make a gurgled noise, because I don’t know what to say to that. I don’t even know why he would say that, besides a lingering breath of the crooked vengeance for the time I briefly abandoned him. He let the whole deal go when I came back with my ears flat and tail between my legs, seeming almost smug, but more so pitying — which if anything is what made me want to completely dissipate into the air. 

“Maybe you should consider being an oracle, Levi,” I say in a single rush of breath. I hitch my bag higher on my shoulders and veer off the sidewalk to go across the green.

“I foresee you stopping to be such a butt-hurt prick by getting a girlfriend like normal people clearly do.” Levi’s whimsical voice follows me as I stomp across the grass, seeming in higher spirits than I’ve ever heard him be. 

As twisted as it may seem, I’ve been spending most of my time in the place where Oli and I had taken to studying — under the sycamore in the middle of the university green, in the middle of everything yet far enough that it became its own sort of haven. I was like one of those loveless old dogs that lurked around the cinders of their master’s scorched house. 

I toss my bag down, the slap of hundreds of dollars of textbooks on the ground not striking an uncomfortable chord in me anymore. I take off my jacket despite the air that has now taken onto having a distinct kiss of chill, especially in the shadows where I stretch out nowadays during my lunch break. I stuff the crumple of the cheap cotton under my head and sink into the cool carpet of the grass, which feels pleasant despite the misty film that still clings to it from the cold dawn. 

I’ve been so wrung-out on sleep that I’ve begun to have it for lunch. At first I thought it was the crazed studying that sent my brain into overdrive and brought down a cascade of those sickeningly vivid dreams that I have not had for a while. But the relapse was strong and independent enough on its own that it did not matter if I went to bed at a reasonable hour or tried stilling my mind by reading a book or watching a dumb television show before falling asleep. Each time I would still tumble into that half-lucid world, my heart palpitating so fast even in the dreams that I would awake with the feeling of falling backwards into my bed from a great height. My nights took on a trembling, insomniac quality, for which the only cure I found was crashing during the day, surrounded by clean sunlight that always pressed in at the edges of my eyelids, tethering me to this world in case I ended up drifting too far again. 

My body melts into the caressing grass blades, my thoughts growing fuzzy at the edges as sleep begins to waltz in at the corners of my mind. The leaves lilt above in a lullaby, the distant toll of the stone bell tower bidding me a peaceful rest. I feel so light now, ephemeral; the thought of everything sour bleeds from me in these transient moments, draining into the ground where I imagine it feeds the growth of the roots of the sycamore below. The thought of him still lingers in the periphery — I hold it in my hands and trace it, finding peace in the planes of him even though they’re not mine to linger over anymore. 

— 

_Her lips are the red of dried fish blood, the fingers of her bony hands gripping my body feel like wet scales rubbing against my skin as she holds me by the shoulders. Her breath on my face is everything that’s ever rotted in the sea, and even though her words are nothing more than the harsh sound of stone grinding against stone, I understand enough: she wishes I were dead. I am a plague on the world in her soulless eyes, but I can see a hard resolve echoing in their depths that for whatever reason keeps her from ending me right there._

You will be dead soon enough.

_I can feel the meaning rattle my bones, worm its way into my soul. She releases me from her deathly grip, but as I fall, my feet never land on the ground._

— 

_From the first notes of feeling, I know something is different. The quality is tricky — the world seems warbled and faraway, viewed from a diaphanous layer, almost like I’m underwater, but not quite so. There is something also untethered about me; disembodied: when I strain for my body, it slips away between the fingers of my mind, and when I chase to grasp it, it darts away like the shadows of little fish in the shallows._

_A movement behind the translucent curtain draws my eyes; it’s something familiar, to which I startle towards as a lost man would to a canny landmark in a foreign city. It’s the same gold aura that draws my eye over and over again, the quarry of my mind and dreams that I can never seem to catch. But there is something wrong to it here, something corrupt; the aureate glow is dimmer, as if it is being drained dry into the surroundings. It drags in circles across the ground, its shimmer fading out until it is the dull brown of slick mud in the sunlight._

_For just a second, the curtain falls and the world focuses into one point: I see the grey wall climbing the cerulean sky, every crag in the massive stones detailed enough that I could run my fingers over it and feel the rough surface as if I’m there, breathing in the dust and blood at its base. There is a shift in the shadows in the upper altitudes of the fortification, and I see him: the sharp face of the handsome archer, the glimmer of silver shrouding him that blesses the arrow he cocks in his bowstring. At the same moment he parts his mouth to take a steadying breath before the exhale of his bow, I open mine to scream — for I already know how the arrow will sail straight and true, lethally lodging into that lingering shadow of gold that hovers in the middle of the battlefield, his head already tilted back into the embrace of death that comes in the next breath. My screams are soundless and hoarse in my empty throat, breaking completely at that smile of unfathomable relief that ghosts his face before he collapses to the ground, all of his light draining into the hungry maws of the dark world that cradles the shell of his first body._

— 

I think my heart’s stopped in my chest and that my lungs have been ripped out, because I choke on the air as I jerk awake, my body trembling as if I’ve been electrocuted. I sit there trying to drink in the dewy air surrounding me, but I can’t hold a breath down without sputtering on it. Something is ringing sharply in my head in almost a melodious beat — it takes me a few minutes to realize that it’s not originating from inside my skull; rather it is my phone that angrily flashes on and off as call after call floods in.

Once I manage a few shaky breaths I pick up my phone in my trembling hand. The lockscreen is inundated with notifications — both calls and messages alternating between Levi and Oli. I reel my attention back to the real world enough to go about reading the first message in the line of over thirty, but the phone begins to whine in my hand as a call lights up the screen with Levi’s name.

“Where in the actual hell are you?” The hiss comes through the line, both threatening and quiet in the way of being uttered in a very public place. 

“I’m, uh —” I push my fingers under my glasses to rub my eyes, only that my glasses are missing from my face. I begin to pat around me with one hand in the grass surrounding me, as my phone that I clutch in my other hand sputters out more outraged words.

“How about you’re, _uh_ , missing our bio midterm right now?”

I sit bolt upright, my phone nearly slipping from my fingers.

“Holy fuck,” I half-shout, as I spring up and begin to desperately scour the grass for the subtle dent of my glasses somewhere. “Shit, I’ll be right there,” I say, ending the call as I hear the first hissed syllable of a reply. I shove my phone into my back pocket since it has delivered the worst of its contents now, even though a minute later it begins to ring again. I try not to think about who it probably is.

I finally find my glasses after almost stepping on them, half-sunk into a patch of clovers that must have caught them sliding from my head after I’d spasmed awake. I begin to haphazardly shrug on my bag, but the first coherent thought of the hour crosses my mind where I realize it is too excessively heavy to set off at a run with, and will only impede my race to the lecture hall halfway across the campus from here. I toss it back down before the trunk of the tree, hoping that no one is going to get too sinister around a ratty bag full of half-torn textbooks and atrociously written notes.

I realize now the true reason for why I’ve never been the person to enjoy running in any context: the amount of stares I receive from the dwindled crowd of students snaking in between buildings is unpleasant in the most acute sense. If a siren wasn’t wailing in my head that I’m missing the exam that would put an irrevocable hole in my grade that might just render it unsalvageable, my social anxiety might have consumed me alive.

I burst through the double doors, the sound of metal slapping brick startling over three hundred heads from the clean-cut packets of paper laid before them, already over halfway flipped through. The professor for a moment looks like he might be about to have a heart attack from my cacophonous entrance, but the surprise leaves his face and is quickly shadowed by a look of profound concern and annoyance.

“Everyone, get back to your exams!” He barks, except it comes out more a strained wheeze with his faint and scratchy voice. I start down the narrow path of steps that cut through the rows of chairs in the auditorium, making a beeline for the professor that stands at the very bottom, anxiously flapping an exam packet at me. Many students have gotten back to their exams out of desperation to finish, but a fine amount still tracks me with their stares as I scurry down the steps. There are two sets of eyes that I can feel particularly pressing in on me from either direction, and only one of them doesn’t leave me until the professor situates me at his seat at the lecture table, in front of the whole hall at the sacrifice of wasting more time at trying to find a vacant seat in the densely packed sea of people.

I barely make a dent in the lengthy labyrinth of questions before time is called, which means that I didn’t even make it in time to hear the fifteen minute warning. I push my glasses up onto my forehead and crush my face into the predominately blank field of my exam as students file past me to lay their complete packets in a pile at a smaller table placed beside mine. I consider not turning my scant work in, to save me from further embarrassment in front of one of the only professors that showed me any favor this semester. I resign on waiting until everyone has gone by, getting their share at staring at that pitiful kid that the whole world knows has fucked up beyond comprehension. 

After a minute or five minutes or ten or maybe an hour, someone gently slides out the exam from under my face. At first I think it’s the professor, fed up with my pathetic performance, but I feel someone sit on top of the table in a very unprofessor-like way. A honey-thick voice that I think I’d know at the end of the world trails down from above me. 

“Hey,” Oli says. It’s just one word, but it breaks me down like he’s just recited the most heart-wringing epic I’ve heard. I keep my eyes closed and forehead pressed to the cold, wooden surface of the table.

“I fucked up really badly,” I mumble into the table. “Have to retake this class …”

“Hey,” he says again, this time more insistently. I want to raise my head, but I’ve fallen captive to an inexplicable gravitational pull between my face and the table. 

There’s just the faintest rustle of movement, and then the most tentative brush of fingers under my chin. The touch stills me, its timidness hypnotizing me into its request to finally lift my head up. 

Without my glasses everything is a little shimmery, but he’s drawn in focus as I gaze up at his face, looking down at me with that easy tilt of his head. Ringlets of bronze frame his face; that timeless curl of a half-smile is there on his lips, just a little more drawn than usual. His fingers still linger just below my chin, and I think he knows just as well as I do that they’re the only thing that is supporting me now, a thin thread between two links of chain. 

“Hey,” he says the third, final time. His voice is so soft, falling onto me with the gentle brush of a snowflake. “It’s not your fault,” he says, and the firm resolve under the warmth of his words makes me believe it for just a second, but —

“I slept through it,” my voice cracks on the second word, drowning the rest of what I say in a hoarse whisper. “I fell asleep, and God, that dream —” A tremor passes through me, my whole body shrinking away even from the thought of it. “I’m just so, so tired.” I close my eyes, and they feel warm; I wonder if I’m crying, and somehow the thought of it does not summon a wave of mortification from me. I never thought that I would find a person in the world who I could cry in front of and not even care about the vulnerability and embarrassment of it all.

“You don’t deserve this,” Oli says. The sudden hardness framing his words draws me out into opening my eyes. He’s not looking at me anymore, but at a distant point when I know he is at war with his mind. I wonder what it is right now that’s making him look so pained, as if he’s the one who screwed up the whole exam. He takes a slow breath and lets go of my chin. “It should have been me. It’s my fault for getting you into this mess.”

“What?” I say, suddenly sitting back straight at the absurdity of the statement. “I’m sorry, but I genuinely don’t see how you should get credit for this shit show of mine.”

Now he’s the one closing his eyes, taking a breath that comes out of his mouth with my name. “Adrian. I know your grades were going downhill long before last week even happened, only I was too fucking selfish to force myself to leave you alone. And then I dragged you into the middle of a historically long and catastrophic mess between me and Allura, only because I panicked at the very last moment, and then I panicked again when I realized that I was probably going to end up losing you anyways —” 

I open my mouth to cut him off, because I feel like if I hear any more of this, my ears might start bleeding, but he hops over my protests as effortlessly as he would over a hurdle.

“— and, and I should’ve apologized, should’ve said something like a normal fucking human being after last time, but instead I left you in the dust because I don’t have an ounce of guts in me to shape up after messing up really, really badly,” he finishes, and his cheeks are as red as if he’d run a race. He finally looks at me, and the melancholy and distress is so thick in his eyes that I can almost taste it in the air, radiating off of him. “I have no right to ask you of this, but please forgive me,” he says, his words devoid of all the usual airiness and life that he carries with them. 

I look straight back at him, holding his eyes locked in mine. I feel like the light brown of them might start dripping onto my cheeks. “No,” I say. His face crumples, and suddenly I realize that in this moment, I have likely pushed him over a precipice he’s never seen the bottom of before. “Not until you can forgive yourself.”

It’s amazing, really, how a person is capable of vacillating between two extremes of emotion in the matter of a second. His laugh comes out more of a snort — a half-hysterical sound, really, but it manages to bring his face from night back into day. 

“You’ll find that is something that might take a very long while for me,” he says, and a curl of that mischievous smile is back, a phantom of his dimples just hovering about his cheeks.

I cross my arms and tilt back a little in the chair, giving him a watery smile. “I’m keen on waiting.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i've been waiting to write this chapter for so, so long even though it is far from as good as i wanted it to be ... but here it is. i'm sorry i've been gone, i've had some things going on in life but at least i'm finally able to get all of this out there. time to catch up on some sleep now :))

_party at fletcher’s tmrw. u should come_

_Oli you know that I don’t do parties_

_pretty pleeeeease? will help get ur mind off things. will be a good time, i promise_

_How can you promise something like that? You’ve never seen me at a party before. I’m not a happy camper, trust me._

_because i’ll be there, obviously :)_

— 

The whole day, my stomach was a gnarl of butterflies. The spiraling equations at my calculus lecture swam before my eyes as I obsessively counted down the minutes to tonight, the integrals beginning to sway dreamily on the chalkboard. I felt like I was courting a certain doom, stepping into a place not yet wandered; a jungle filled with dazzlings flowers that dripped with toxins, beckoning with their sweetness into the canopied depths. I grooved a million excuses into my tongue on why not to go, but refusing to Oli was like refusing to wish on a shooting star: it felt too cosmic an opportunity to miss. 

“Wow, at _Fletcher’s?_ Are you sure?” 

I’d reluctantly told Levi my plans for tonight, after he’d insistingly tried to reel me into a study group. I hate him for being the personification of the constant voice in my head.

“Yeah, I don’t know. I might just show up and leave, you know, be _classy_ and all,” I say, drawing aimless loops in the corner of my calculus homework. I wish I could remember what it felt like to be able to focus. 

“Just don’t OD on anything,” he begins to say, but then he interrupts himself by suddenly reaching across the table to my messy calculus as something snags his attention. “You’ve got your domain and range switched here,” he says, tapping some spot on the paper. Even Levi is able to comprehend math upside down, while I can’t orient my brain to figure it out right-side up. I roll my eyes at him.

“Thanks for the advice. I’ll write it down on my hand so that I don’t forget.” I reach for a pen and put it to my skin just to yank him out his geeky immersion in my homework, but I find him peering at me seriously from behind his glasses. There’s a solemn line to his brows that borders on a concern that he rarely directs at anyone, ever. 

“Just don’t get hurt.” He could mean it in the physical way, as in, _don’t get drunk and crack your skull open on the ground by accident_ , but I know he doesn’t. He hasn’t forgotten about last week, but neither have I; the only difference between us though is on who pushed me into that chasm. 

— 

By ten that night, I still have not come up with a logical excuse to bail without coming across as the lamest person ever, so I’m standing in the dusty ground-floor of Oli’s apartment building as one of his roommates brings around our ride to the party. The hall feels quite full with the overwhelming presence of other roommates and the friends of roommates; their energy rubs and frizzes against each other, electrified storm clouds with their short barks of laughter and restless feet scuffing on the tiles. Allura and Oli stand in the midst of the loose cluster, yet somehow they are separate from the effervescent sway around them — there’s almost like a natural, inherent demarcation to the both of them, of two deities hovering just above the ground, their feet brushing the grass stalks of the mundane.

Allura keeps rubbing her nose, her eyes already hooded beneath the layers of mascara. She’s nearly swaying towards Oli, leaning towards the sun that streaks faster across the sky than the flowers have time to list their faces towards. There’s a solemness to him that I’ve only ever seen before on the day of a race — a dangerous edge lurks in him that is not so much seen as felt, like running a finger down the precarious line of a knife until the first tear of scarlet unknowingly glints on the metal.

“How much longer?” She whines, pouting up at Oli who continues to pensively stare out the front glass door. Her voice has a smoky and dull quality, making me think everyone but me is already knee-deep in revelry.

Her hands flutter like agitated butterflies all over her body, running through her hair and fixing the smear of her eyeshadow and fiddling with the zippers on her leather jacket. Oli sighs, but it’s an oddly calming sound, like sea foam hissing over the pebbles on a beach. Allura sloppily wraps one of her arms around his, leaning into his side and placing her head on his shoulder. He’s as cold and abrasive as if he were forged of marble, the only movement about him is the subtle flutter of his eyes closing — something I know I’m the only person to witness in the dusky light of the echoing hall. 

The brilliant light of headlights suddenly floods in through the front door, inundating the entrance hall in a dizzying moment of sharp shadows and glimmering hair halos. After a second everyone springs into movement, finding their footing. 

The dust-streaked entrance doors creak as we all flutter out. I’m surprised to find Oli trailing alongside me in the dregs of the crowd, Allura carried off in the tide ahead of us. He stops a step before me, holding the glass door halfway open. 

“I don’t want to force you into this, if you don’t want to go.” It comes out almost the same calm sigh, that hiss of sea mist, his face in stark shadow as he stands with his back to the headlights, his head tilted towards me. I can feel myself squinting against the glare, trying to focus in on his expression — so I rub my eyes before it gets too weird, taking the few seconds to roll around the words on my tongue for a reply.

“No, I need this,” I finally say, because deep down I feel like I do — to dip my fingers into the unfamiliar chaos, to experience this acute yet electrifying part of him. I think he smiles at me, the shadows across his face rippling with the movement. 

“I leave when you do.” He says it with the certain finality of a vow, pushing the door open all the way for me. I follow him outside, to where Allura is blowing gusts of murder in my direction. It takes a few blinks for me to realize that the car is a pickup, and we’re left to pile into the back as the cab is already a mess of arms and heads.

“Freshies get the back,” the driver sings, rapping his palm on the side of his door. Alex, I think is his name; one of the swimmers living with Oli, his bleached hair quicksilver under the refractions of light as he hangs his head out the window. Semi-familiar and unfamiliar faces peek out from the shadows of the windows, fizzing with anticipation. 

Oli helps Allura into the back, holding onto her hand as someone would hold onto a lit match. I scramble in behind him and the back shuts and we’re on our way — the truck bed cold and rattling under every bump and pothole we hit. The temperature has really taken a liking to plummeting at night in the last month, flirting with the promise of winter. My unjustly thin jacket and the collective warmth of our bodies holds the briskness just at bay as we run our mouths warm with directionless conversation. 

Someone’s wondering aloud if there’s going to be LSD; I’m wondering internally how I’m actually going to get back to my place. The longer we drive, past the buttery storefronts of town and into the labyrinth of a neighborhood littered with candy-colored garden lights, I realize that it’s not going to be a walkable trek back. We take so many turns down identical roads with generic street names flashing green in the dark that I’m not sure I’ll be able to easily navigate to even a bus stop. I wonder how much Oli means of what he said earlier, since our safe passage back is out of his hands; I try to catch his eyes but his face is turned away as he stubbornly props his chin up in a hand balanced on the rim of the pickup, lost in the streak of sepia-bathed houses whistling by. I watch the brisk fingers of the night breeze play in his hair, his curls rising and falling in mesmerizing waves. 

Allura’s pressed up against him again, his other arm wrapped loosely around her slim frame. I’m back to working out the mismatched puzzle of the two of them, but then that’s when I hear it — like the distant footfalls of a titan walking the earth, rolling down the street in the thunder of bass. It’s music that worms its way into your bones, cackling like electricity in the air, purring through the mechanical frame of the car. 

We round the final corner and there it is: three stories of ample suburb house lit from top to bottom, a homing beacon to the swarm of cars trying to parallel park and people loitering around the lawn, the condensation of their breaths in the cold indistinguishable from cigarette smoke. The neighboring homes seem to be helplessly hunkering down against the boisterous breaths of the behemoth, their shutters drawn tight against the apocalyptic bursts of neon lights.

It’s every breath of the myth-like recounts I’ve heard, eccentric and bacchanalian; a revelry to quake the heavens above. 

People spill out of cars in one great rupture of color and sound. Broken chandeliers weep in the overgrown lawn, ultraviolet teeth flash and snap in the effervescent air. It’s everything like the sensation of holding a fizzing firecracker in your fingers, basking in the thrilling seconds before you let it go in a deathly rain of color and smoke and blinding light. 

Alex lets us unload before circling the perimeter for parking, all of us rushing out over one another, moths flocking to a lamp. I stick to the middle of the loose pack as we flit across the unruly lawn, always a few steps behind Oli and Allura, a shadow at their heels. My heart echoes in my chest to every burst of music and laughter vibrating through the ground and into my bones, my lungs catching and crashing like great oceanic waves. We pass the pillar-like posts framing the front door on the sprawling porch, funneling us all through a doorway cracked open to the underworld. 

The inside is full of shadowy corners and ashy air, leather couches draped with the jaded trust-fund boys. From all I’ve heard they are the actual inhabitants of this place — the type that are perpetually high on money, drugs, diesel gasoline fumes. There’s a different quality of sound once we’re inside, almost as if we’re underwater; warbled wavelengths of noise hitting me on all sides, detached snatches of conversation and stray beats of the bass weaving through the air. 

I startle as we pass by a riotously laughing blonde in a vintage suit, drawing contrails of smoke through the air with his smoldering fingers. My skin tingles under the chaotic and unfamiliar, the disorienting air akin to a foreign, lawless country. I try to move with the confident prance of the athletes in front of me, shoulders back and haughty chin tilt — yet I feel like a wheat stalk snapped in the wrong direction, incongruous in the even sway of the field. 

We continue to snake through hazy rooms with their swirl of bodies, sweat-sugared faces blurring by until we finally reach the sliding glass doors leading to a patio in the back. 

Thinking that most of the party is inside was a dreadful mistake.

The patio dips down into a vast yard below, so saturated with people moving all at once that it gives the impression of a whirling kaleidoscope. An impressive pool stretches in the middle, lambent with a fervent aquamarine under all of its lights. 

Oli turns partway around towards me, the side of his face haloed in a different glow every few seconds — red green blue orange purple yellow. A half-smile is shadowed on his lips. He’s about to say something, but then someone looms in behind me, startling me as I feel the smooth plastic cup pressed into my limp hand.

“Drink a little, live a little,” I hear Alex’s drawl wrapping around my side. I half-turn half-stumble out of his way as he hands out the same red cups to the others, stacked precariously between his arms and chin.

Oli peers down into his cup, something distasteful and bored about his gaze. “Do I dare ask what this is?” He says, swishing it around skeptically.

“Vodka-something? Something to fuck you up, that’s for sure.” Alex winks at me, and suddenly I feel raw for the clear fact written all over my face that I have never been drunk before in my life. Allura scoffs, but takes a swig of it before hooking her arm around Oli’s, pulling him down the stone steps towards the yard. I’m standing numb with the red plastic growing clammy in my hand, trapped in the feeling of lucidity teetering into an incontrollable dream. 

“Come,” I hear that honeyed voice, beckoning to me from a few steps down. Oli’s standing there looking back up at me, Allura still tugging him down. I look at the pandemonium behind him and then at the hopeful tilt of his eyes, the crinkle framing them as when someone says _let me show you the world_. I press my eyes shut for a moment and tilt my head back slightly, exhaling a thin, cloudy breath. He’s like that gold aura in the battlefields of my dreams, the bulwark against chaos; the steady, grounding warmth of a hand laid against my cheek. I open my eyes and return that silent smile, willing to follow him across the River Styx. 

—

I keep that head of curls and flash of rosy cheeks in my field of vision for as long as I can, but eventually the crowd picks us apart. The bass down here makes the ground purr into my heels, the press of bodies clad in lacy glitter and dewy t-shirts jostling me around as a tropical hurricane would. I’m not dancing, but the act of dodging unruly bodies whirling at me from every direction causes me to sway and sidestep in a motion familiar to the music. My ears ring with disjointed shouts, with speakers trembling in the assault of EDM. The cup in my hand has splashed over so many times that I just clutch its alcoholic shell in my hand. 

Sometimes, like the silvery backs of fish breaching a frothing river, I see the familiar backs and faces of one of Oli’s friends or friends of friends, or otherwise a set of eyes that I would have seen before peeled on the same lecture whiteboards as mine. Oli himself flashes in and out, as suddenly and sporadically as a rock skipping over the surface of a lake. He’s always with Allura though — there, shouting over the music at some volleyball player judging by the height; there by the keg, tipping it forward so that someone could drain the last of its beer. There by the DJ, there under the light, there in the mass of skin and neon, lost in the music, in the energy of the technicolor crowd. There, there, there — swift as a bird through the canopy, a firefly arcing through the air in bursts of chemical light.

I find myself by the edge of the pool, where I have three sides instead of four to worry about. A few times I’m almost toppled in, but the crowd is just a bit thinner at its perimeter in observation of the precarious edge. Wisps of steam rise from it, and by the dip of a hand it is just the right temperature; yet no one seems to swim in it, as if the madness boiling at its brim is unable to breach its calmness. 

There, there, there, and now here he is, bled out of the froth and standing beside me, studying me as I study the tiled pool bottom. I turn to him, feeling the air bite my cheeks into red once I realize he is at last alone, all of the wild sea of his attention washing over me. 

“Thought I’d strand you here all alone?” His voice is high and effervescent, his cheeks flushed and eyes shining like they’d drunk the Milky Way. I can’t tell if he’s exhilarated from the party or exhilarated from its products; the drinking and dancing. It’s smearing off on me, making me feel light and euphoric, a smile climbing my face in response to the unruly one teasing his. 

“I had to trust my gut that you’d find me,” I say. His face brilliantly sparks at the words and I realize that my words do ring true; it’s inexplicable, the steadiness that comes with knowing you’re on someone’s mind — it’s selfish to think that in all this madness I could possibly haunt his thoughts, yet the notion feels right as knowing the sun will shine on my skin again. 

“I’m glad I’m on good terms with your gut,” he says, his words riddled with laughter. He rocks back on his heels a bit, pensive, and then — “Can you dance?”

“What ever I am doing now is the extent of my dancing,” I say, gesturing grandly to my slightly swaying body.

Oli takes the crushed cup out of my hand and sets it on the ground. Then he steps closer to me, so close that I feel the sticky warmth of his body, the tickle of his breath as he tilts his mouth to my ear.

“Think of something that makes you feel alive. That reverberates through your body, makes you want to give motion to the thought,” he says, his voice scratchy in its lowness and the overwhelming rush of sound around trying to drown it. 

“What?” I say, in half a laugh. The suddenly cool yet mesmerizing timbre in his voice runs a strange feeling in me, and I don’t know how to react — I feel like I’ve been given a paintbrush and told to paint, yet terrified of not knowing what to do for the first brushstroke. 

“Anything. Any feeling, any memory, any emotion you’ve ever wanted to personify, to ignite. Think of it, and give it rhythm. Give your body over to it, Adrian.” I shiver with every brush of his words against my ear, of the effort of trying to well up anything particularly striking within my life, of something resonating within the soul. 

_There’s the first time I’ve ever seen him through the fence: bounding across rubber and afternoon sunshine like a force of nature, so beautiful yet intimidating. I’d spent days, weeks, turning that image of him over and over again in the fingers of my mind like a curious pebble, always making me want to imagine what it’s like to be the miracle of him, of muscle and bone and tissue so perfectly synchronized for the world._

_There’s that memory, or dream, or memory of a dream — it haunts me but in a warm way, startling me pleasantly when I’m most unprepared for it, like a cat suddenly rubbing up against your leg. When the sunlight slants through the window shutters in just the right shade of dusty gold, over a pair of hands fiddling with a pencil or flitting through the air in conversation, I am always reminded of these perfect hands I can’t seem to place to their owner — yet they are so smooth and graceful, soaked in sunshine themselves, the fingers fluttering over the strings of an instrument my eyes have never traced before. It’s such a beautiful and calming vision that I could weep over the fact that it’s lost its tie from its origin within my mind, that I could see it so vividly but not hear it, the music that I know will flood my veins with joy._

I imagine those elegant fingers on the foreign strings are mine, that I’ve become drunk on the memory of being starved for Oli’s awing movement. I move slowly, timidly, my limbs gradually losing their tie to my body, swaying with the abandon of flower petals in the breeze. Oli’s hands drift over my shoulders, my sides, my hips — guiding me, animating me. I hear the music, but it’s not what I’m moving to — it’s the rhythm of it that illuminates the feelings I’m chasing, that gives them the air to breathe again through my body. 

I’m actually dancing now, aimlessly and awkwardly, but I feel the acceleration of dopamine it triggers through my body; the electrifying feeling of allowing something beyond simple neurons to dictate all movement, to have sound and motion and thought set me untethered. Oli pulls back away from my ear but he doesn’t step away; we’re dancing almost nose-to-nose, our mouths echoing the same silly and jubilant smiles. 

There’s a moment we’re so close I can almost think that our noses brush each other’s, that I feel the whisper of his hair across my forehead. I can see every shade of amber and olivine and earthy brown in his eyes, changing hues in the different washes of light but never flickering away from mine. His mouth is so close that his breath condenses on my lips, and I almost shiver with the knowledge that if I were to tilt my chin just a little bit —

There’s a second when I think I feel a warm, rose-petal soft press against my mouth, but just then a shattering shriek cleaves through the world. The next moment I’m falling, falling sideways through the air — he grasps me by the shirt, and I clutch him by the arm, and we’re hitting the water harder than falling awake from a dream. 

The kiss of the water is shocking even though it’s not cold; the sudden heaviness of wet clothes and the resistance to my kicking limbs seems a startling juxtaposition to the infinite lightness I’d felt seconds before. Sputtering and confused, I breach the surface; but just then I hear the atomic drop of another body hitting the water with a triumphant howl, followed by the percussion of more and more limbs striking the warbled surface of the pool.

I feel the tickle of air bubbles beside me and there swims Oli, his hair plastered to a face that echoes the same bewilderment as mine. He shakes the hair out of his eyes and I follow his odd gaze to a gap in the crowd, rapidly closing behind a slender figure storming into the depths.

Our fall has shattered some sacred barrier granting entrance to the pool as more and more bodies pour in on all sides, making the water riotously splash around us and the pool lights frantically dance across the surfacing faces. Oli dips his head back under the water and resurfaces with laughter bubbling from his lips, but it’s more agitated than merry, a shadow of something unpleasant echoing in its depths.

“Are … you okay?” I ask out of the lack of anything else to say, the words coming out nearly a gasp as I choke on a fresh wave of chlorine. I try to brush the hair out of my eyes to see him better, but then he’s still a little blurry — I realize it’s my glasses that are the problem, or the lack of them.

“Yeah. Yeah, yeah,” he says, in that sighing way of his — yet his words are pitched with a clear discomfort, something biting hovering at the edges. I know it’s not directed at me, but it makes all of the effervescence of the party fizz out, leaving the dull and drained echo of its high moments before. “And you? That was quite an unpleasant drop,” he says, gracefully floating around me in an aimless circle. 

“I’m good, but I lost my glasses, and … my phone is fucked,” I realize belatedly, once my mind processes the odd heaviness in one of my pockets. Oli dives down and within seconds fishes out my glasses, placing them back on my head. 

“Well, that solves one issue. Not much we can do about the second one, at least immediately, anyways,” he says, casually drifting onto his back.

“Is it stupid to hope that your phone isn’t on you?”

He shrugs, or at least suggests the movement as he’s mostly submerged underwater. “I didn’t bring it. I learned a long time ago with these parties.”

“Right,” I say. There’s so much I want to say though that I can’t think of a way to coherently line it up on my tongue, but what stands out in the very front, what I want to shout right now to the world is, _what the fuck just happened._ Everything — the dancing, the almost-press of his lips on mine, the scream of a wrath born of a god and the slap of the water on my face. The last minutes have gone by quicker than my mind can process, my body reacting like a lifeless, preprogrammed automaton. 

“Yeah,” Oli says, a little dreamily. “I’m sorry about her. Tonight’s been weird.”

 _About her_. I want to ask, what exactly about her is going on, when the force of it has knocked me off of my feet now, literally. I want to take Oli’s casual form and shake him by the shoulders, to get him to find some sort of justification for her continued presence and everything that just happened. Instead, I blow out a breath of bubbles and then say, “I think I’m getting out.”

He blinks at the words, as if processing them for a moment. Then he drifts back upright and says, “Alright, I’ll go with you.”

We float our way through the bodies now bobbing all around the pool, trying not to get kicked in the side or splashed in the face. We get out and go to sit quietly on one of the lounge chairs, both of us seeming lost for what to do after everything that lead up to our miserable, drenched states. I don’t realize that I start shaking from the brisk autumn air and the cling of wet clothes to my body until Oli is dragging me up and leading me back to the main house. 

“I’ll find some towels, maybe steal some clothes while I’m at it. They won’t miss them here anyways,” he says lightly, herding me up the steps to the patio. I can’t stop thinking about how his hair still messily clings to the sides of his face, how he’s lost his jacket and all there is is the diaphanous layer of his wet shirt, taunting me every time the light strikes it fully.

We’re inside, and he takes me by my sleeve to lead me through the house, still populated by stumbling and whirling revelers. He lets me go to climb a set of stairs to the second floor, primarily empty except for a glaze-eyed shell of a person slumped here and there or the creak of two bodies colliding behind a door. Oli aptly weaves around corners and through corridors until we end up in what looks like a master bedroom occupied by a large table and a few chairs scattered around. Cards litter the table among the cinder cones; a flat mirror with a half-curled bill is precariously abandoned by its edge. 

Attached to the strangely set-up room is a generous bathroom — two sinks, jacuzzi tub, porcelain tiles. It seems largely unused, dust powdering every surface, yet Oli opens a dresser that miraculously vomits out a pile of clean towels. 

“They keep them up here so that obviously everyone from the pool doesn’t use them up. They’re also the expensive plush ones for, you know, the lot that lives here,” Oli explains as he picks one up from the pile deposited on the floor. I’m too distracted by the neglected lavishness of the bathroom to notice that Oli has stilled halfway through handing me the towel, staring at something on my body, stomach-high. 

I glance down and realize that the white shirt I’d worn has been rendered nearly translucent by the pool, and the ghostly pale birthmark that dominates a side of my stomach and stretches towards my back is perfectly visible through the fabric. It’s a little discomfiting, always having been a peculiar quirk of my body that made hot summers by the lake difficult — it’s the especially stark contrast of a large splash of colorlessness against the plane of caramel skin that snags the eye.

I clear my throat, which seems to snap Oli back into action. He hands me the towel silently, but I can see the uneasiness clinging to him from being caught staring.

“Well, I’m going to go figure out our ride back,” he says a little stiffly as he scoops up a towel for himself. “I mean, that is, if you want to go …?” He adds hesitantly, looking at me to gauge my response.

I wave a hand nonchalantly through the air, even though I’m quite firm on deciding what I want. “It’s on you,” I say quietly, “if you’ve had enough.” I really don’t mean to sound as cold as it comes out, but I think it’s a combination of general numbness and exhaustion that wears my tone down to utter flatness.

“No, no, I totally want to go. I just didn’t want to cut this night short for you.” He’s probably thinking that this has turned out to be my first and last outing in my university years, and there’s some unexpressed guilt he’s feeling for it. I wish I could tell him that none of this is really the result of anything done wrong on his part, but I’m too cold and tired to wade back into the muddiness of analyzing the last hour. The towel is remarkably fluffy and warm though, but I feel there’s a permafrost that’s rooted deep into my bones, too stubborn to thaw. 

“Alright. I’ll wait up here for you if I don’t get booted out,” I say, sitting down on the wide side of the tub. He gives me a drawn smile and he’s gone, out the doorway and back into the chaos to arrange our breakout from this delirious fortress. I perch on the tub until my mind begins to dance dangerously close to the present, so I decide to busy myself with folding the extra towels that had fallen out which Oli had hastily shoved back into the dresser.

I jerk up as some minutes later I hear the patter of someone’s footsteps in the adjacent room, and for a second I am surprised that Oli has so swiftly found someone to take us back, but then the cadence — mainly the very light tap that comes with delicate feet, is very unlike his.

I turn in half-horror, my mind calculating who it is before my eyes register it. Allura stands in the doorway, shaking in a rage to blow the needles off of a Richter scale. The mascara runs down her porcelain cheeks in ugly, black rivers; a corrupt angel weeping. The whole time I’m crouched there on the ground below, staring up petrified at her like some peasant at the heels of an empress. 

“Look at what you _did_ ,” she screeches, stumbling towards me as I scramble to stand up, pressing myself up against the side of the dresser. She grabs me by the towel around my neck and latches onto it like a severely distressed child trying to get attention, making me stoop slightly forwards against her force even though she’s not that much shorter than me. She reeks of something bittersweet — sticky cotton candy and sharp ethanol.

“What did I do?” I gasp as the towel chafes against my neck. It’s a useless question to ask, the type to buy you time when someone sticks a gun barrel to your temple, screaming for retribution. I feel a barren wasteland on the inside, a tundra howling with empty wind. 

“He’s supposed to be mine. Mine, mine, _mine!_ ” She’s eased her grip on the towel but now shoves the side of her face into it, screaming the words as she makes ghastly streaks of black in the cheerful egg-yellow thread. “Why did he ever have to meet you, when you would ruin absolutely everything! You don’t even know the damage you’ve done, you don’t know, you don’t know!” She’s sobbing into my chest, shaking against me with the force of her cries. I’m in the most uncomfortable and bewildering position of my life ever, pressed against a dresser by a girl, but definitely not in the enjoyable way. I let herself rattle out all of her fury and grief into me, the chasm of my chest absorbing every wave of bitterness that racks through her, letting it taint me. I try to piece together a valid and calming thing to say, but it’s like trying to string beads onto a slippery thread with clumsy fingers. My mind is ringing with that heartbeat of bliss down by the pool, his lips against mine, every inch of my body electrified by that one connection. It clouds my cognition, a fog I can’t seem to lift. I open my mouth again to speak, deciding to stand by whatever wells up on my tongue at that very moment.

“It’s not what you thought it was,” I say hoarsely onto the top of her head. She suddenly pulls back, as if repelled by those words, finally giving me a little ground to breathe as she trips back a couple of steps.

Her laugh is hysterical, her eyes fizzing like spilt acid. “You wear glasses yet you’re so blind, you call yourself a pre-med major yet you’d be hard-pressed to find someone denser than you,” she spits at me as she hangs off of the side of a towel rack, her body unsteady but her eyes as uncompromising on me as daggers pinned into skin. 

I don’t feel any sting, any offense; only white noise in my head, distressing and drowning as television static. I open my mouth then shut it closed, any words drying up on my hot and choking tongue as my skin burns up under her scorching presence. A few heartbeats pass, which feel like they’re going to punch through my chest cavity and spill my organs out onto the floor. The silence is the most unbearably loud thing I’ve ever heard; it seeps through my ears and drills painfully into my brain. It detonates a second wave of indignation from her, one that nearly knocks me off of my feet for a second time tonight.

“He’s gay! He’s gay! He’s gay!” She wails as she suddenly falls into me again, her bubblegum acrylics clawing into my skin. “And he fucking loves _you_ , of all the people,” she screeches like a pterodactyl, stooping dangerously low off of my body. I almost drop her. I gently pry her off of me instead, and stagger a few steps sideways out from under her. 

“No,” I breathe, the word drifting faint as a feather from my lips. I’m gripping the edge of the sink, desperately trying to find something steady to hold onto, but even the marble edge feels like it’s about to collapse from under me. Allura is similarly slumped against the adjacent wall, her shoulders turned in in such a way as if someone’s run a blade through her chest. “No,” I say again, more to the roar of my mind, the riot of my heart trying to escape my body. “It can’t be.” 

“It already is,” she says emptily, seemingly having exhausted all of the cataclysmic distress within her. She slides down the wall the rest of the way to sit on the floor, wrapping her arms around her shoulders like a starved waif, her face ghoulish under all the ebony tear streaks and the deadness of her glacial eyes. I stay clinging to the sink, just barely — I divide my whole attention to this effort, otherwise I would hit the ground with a crack. We stay like that for minutes, our torn breaths filling the sterile glow of the bathroom. I still hear the party outside tapping against the windows, still in full life — but it feels a world away, detached as hearing a sound from a movie. 

Just then, it suddenly clicks in my head — everything coming into a horrific, astronomical alignment. 

“You’re blackmailing him,” I breathe, feeling a revulsion rising in my stomach, making me almost physically nauseous. I’m still holding onto the side of the counter, but I feel a strength ebbing back into my bones as everything builds up in my mind, a trickle of snow triggering a wrathful avalanche. “You knew for a long time.” I know what I say is true without having to see the confirmation in her smeared eyes. 

The smile she gives me is the most gruesome thing I’ve ever seen, devoid of anything akin to pleasantness. It nearly drips with venom. “I saw him with a boy in high school.” 

I draw in a breath, which rattles the shutters of my lungs. It’s the opening notes to a long and sorrowful song, terrible but so enticing that you can’t bring yourself not to listen to it, to destroy yourself to it. 

“I saw him behind the bleachers one day, kissing a boy. The perfect, beautiful, devastating Oli kissing a boy when all the girls at school would lay down before an oncoming train for him. I still don’t think there has been anything in this life that’s made me forget how to breathe from the unfairness, the tragedy of it all.” She recites the words mechanically, as if giving a monologue for a film. “I wanted him so bad that I told him that I knew, that if he wanted me to keep quiet then he’d have to crown me as his queen, to let me claim that lusted spot at his side.” 

“That’s — that’s screwed up on so many levels, Allura,” I say, scrunching my eyes with my hands out of the pain, the bitter injustice I feel for him in this moment. 

“You don’t understand, he’s every girl’s dream, the most tragic miracle to let go to waste. Athletic, affluent, handsome; weekend getaways on his dad’s private jet, a guaranteed place on the guest list at the most prestigious events and to one day have your face in the press and more dollar bills than you can count in your purse. To have him beside you is to know what it’s like to walk along a god.” 

“He’s not just an accessory to be flaunted around,” I say though gritted teeth. Every successive word out of her mouth ignites a blaze within me, building to a wildfire that could consume me whole. 

“No, but I am.” She says with a high and tinkling laugh. “I’m the palisade, the only thing standing between him and the unforgiving cruelty of the world that would consume him raw out of the bitterness for what he is. It would destroy his image, it would destroy his mother. I met her before, you know. She is a powerful woman in spirit, very much the traditional type.” 

“Does she know?” 

“I can imagine that she suspects it. She was exceptionally pleased when Oli introduced me.” 

“So all of this is okay to you? This is love to you?” The nails of my fisted hands are digging so hard into my palms they might draw blood. I’m so devastated, so haunted by knowing the weight that the weightless boy carries so silently. 

She laughs silkily, her voice bleeding back from its raw grief to its coquettish air. “You must understand there are not many options for me regarding my position in life. I come from a place that the only way to get out is to marry out.” 

For a moment I imagine that I can see it, the shadow of a dreadful little town she is trying to flee — the mother slaving away at a beauty salon, laughing the same silky laugh as currency for a hefty tip. The glaze-eyed father with the television remote hanging limply in his hand, an expired banker for which the pressure of supporting his family had pulled the trigger on his mind all too soon. And there’s Allura, buying the cheap lipstick because it makes pretty boys want to kiss her, investing not skills but her body in her future. 

“I don’t pity you,” I say, despite everything, despite her own flaws and personal tragedies. “You can’t ruin another life to make your own.” 

“What do you know about life, huh? I bet your daddy is funding you to become a nice, rich doctor so that he could say he did a good job on you.” 

It’s frightening how well she can read a person, especially considering how severely I’ve underestimated her before. Everything about her is that of a slow-acting venom, a pain lulling you into sleep until its too late — until you’re caught in the lethal kiss of the bite. I feel so helpless, unmasked; knowing I’ve been struck with checkmate. 

“We—” I begin, my voice coming rough and choked. I clear my throat and try again. “We can’t choose our circumstances in life, but we can choose how we best act about them. And that includes,” I look up, leveling her with a steady, unflinching stare, “not sacrificing someone else for the elevation of your own.” 

A door whines, and there is a cacophony of footsteps on the floor. Two girls stumble into the wave of silence following my words, giggling and tripping over air. 

“All _urrrahh_ ,” one of the girls slurs, as she spots Allura still folded in on herself in one of the corners, her face riddled with ink black, her red lips gruesomely smeared by her worrying hand. “What’s wrong?” The girl coos, her words slurring at the edges, but a single gear does still turn in her head. She turns to stare at me, her mouth slowly going wide to shape the accusation, while her equally adrift friend crouches down by Allura to fuss over her. 

“I’m leaving,” I say curtly before she forms the words, my body moving mechanically towards the door. There’s nothing in my mind but pure survival instinct, moving only out of the way of danger in inherent preservation. I have half the thought to ditch the towel on the stair banister as I stumble my way downstairs, trying to find an out from that room upstairs, from this house, from this night. I carry myself towards what I think is the direction of the front door, marionette-like, but then a firm hand settles on my arm. 

“Hey kid,” Oli’s roommate Alex says from above me; I only recognize him by his blocky voice and messily bleached hair. He doesn’t appear to be drunk or high, but there is the clear sour miasma of the party about him. “He’s down here already,” he shouts to someone behind us, and I blearily turn to see the surrounding people part around Oli as he leaps down from the few steps he had taken up the staircase. 

“We ready to go?” Oli says, a little breathlessly once he strides up beside us. His cheeks are flushed and his hair is falling in chaotic, half-dried waves along his head — yet the most disconcerting thing about him is how he wavers slightly from side to side, as if he’s about to tip over if he leans a little too much one way. I don’t know what he took while he was down here, but his face looks like he’s studying the stars even though we’re indoors. 

Alex emits a piercing whistle, which temporarily cleaves the room for a few disorienting seconds. Here and there people begin to stumble out of corners and corridors as Alex beckons them to us. 

“Hey, where’s —? Okay, you know what. Never mind. We’re leaving,” he begins to say, but then something passes between him and Oli, the latter’s mouth visibly tightening. I’m sort of herded towards the door, Oli a few steps behind me, feeling like a flame burning at my heels. He keeps trying to step closer to me, but I stumble and weave out of the way. We’re finally outside where the sky is heavy with the deep and empty night that dips before dawn. Conversations and smoke still echo from pools of dark, but the lawn has considerably settled since we’ve first gotten here. I sit down on the curb as we all wait for Alex to hunt down his truck, every breath of the night air feeling raw and scathing inside my chest. 

Oli comes to stand by me, but he doesn’t sit down; I think he finally feels my slipperiness, my fleeting movements every time he drifts too close. I stare at the cement at my feet, weakly reflecting the wash of a street lamp nearby. There’s a tangible shift in the air as he opens his mouth to say something, but all I can think to do is to drown out his words before anything else being said can lay waste to me. 

“What about Allura?” I say, my own voice ringing dead and worn to my own ears. 

“She’ll find herself where she needs to be,” he replies, his words drifting faintly from behind me. We both let ourselves hover in the drained silence that ensues, letting the cadence of the post-midnight street whisper in our ears. Finally, a set of headlights come around the corner; I gather myself off of the ground with a momentous effort. 

The rest of the people coming with us stagger half-lucidly towards the doors of the pickup, but Oli’s lilting voice cuts through their motion. 

“Let Adrian sit inside. He’s still wet from the pool.” 

I want to scream at him for caring so much, for drawing the unnecessary attention on me, the weary, assessing looks that flood my face. There is a collective shrugging, and I feel someone gently push me towards the open door in the back — I try not to flinch completely when I know its his hand, guiding me by the ridge of my shoulder. 

I crawl in, being forced in the narrow middle seat as someone’s already hopped in from the other side. I’m terrified that Oli is going to trap me in from the other end, but his face disappears from the open door as he rounds his way towards the truck bed. 

“Hey, I don’t want you getting sick either. Get a jacket or get inside,” Alex calls from the front, stopping Oli in his tracks. I see him pat his body, as if searching for his waterlogged jacket, then realizing it’s not there and hesitantly turning back towards the cab. Shotgun is predictably taken, and the only option is to cram in next to me. It’d be cruel to force someone to shed their jacket or for that matter force Oli into the back, but I feel like I might fizz out and cackle into the air if I get too close to him again. 

Someone grumbles about the wait as Oli continues to stand there, knowing something is deeply off with me while being lost on the reason, except knowing it has intolerably something to do with him. I know I’ll shatter if I have to watch another second of him looking so miserable, so confounded. 

“Come on,” I say softly. 

He hesitates, processing the permission, then slips in beside me. The door shuts behind him with a crack, and just like that there’s no escape for either of us. 

I close my eyes, trying to close him out, but it’s impossible — focusing on the grind of the wheels against cement only makes his breathing sound more musical; filling my nostrils with the must-and-rubber smell of the cab only makes that faint incense of eucalyptus that always clings to him all the more sweeter. I know I’m starting to shake again, but I can’t stop. I’m pressed into his warm side, his damp shirt molding around me, yet he pretends very, very hard to be unbothered out of his respect for me. I open my eyes to see him staring out the window, his breath fogging his drawn reflection. 

“Jesus, the kid’s trembling like a mouse,” the guy next to me says, shifting uncomfortably against me. “You that cold or something?” 

I don’t answer, but I feel Alex turn on the heater, making the inside even muggier. There’s no point in telling them that it’s a different kind of cold I’m feeling. 

— 

“Stay over,” Oli whispers, the moment we’re out of the truck and alone, left behind by the rest, stumbling zombie-like towards the apartment building. He’s stopped a careful distance from me, but close enough that there is no easy way to go around him without being blatantly rude. 

I shake my head, watching his mouth settle into a firm line, his brows draw together. 

“But you’re shivering and wet. You’ll catch your death walking out here like this. Let me at least try to convince someone to give you a ride.” 

At four in the morning? “I’d rather walk,” I say softly, shifting my feet in the direction of the campus. 

I forget sometimes, how fast he can move. How silently, gracefully, precisely; a predator effortlessly pouncing on prey. He’s beside me, his hand stopped just a breath from my shoulder as I’m about to turn away. 

“I’m — I’m sorry,” he says, instantly drawing back, tilting his face to the ground. I can see every tight breath escaping his lips, crystallizing in the frigid pre-dawn air. “I just … think you should stay.” 

I close my eyes at the words, wanting to weep, to scream, to drown into the ground. I just want — 

“Oli, I — please. I want to walk home.” 

“Alright,” he whispers, the word barely a puff of white. “Let me know when you get there.” 

I nod emptily, staring at the drowning black of the asphalt at our feet. I look up at him before I turn to go, briefly drinking in the planes of his face in the chilling moonlight, carved starkly in rare uncertainty. He glances up at me, and I glance away, settling my eyes on the dulling glow of a distant light ahead of me as I turn away. 

_I just want_ — 

My nails bite into my skin, I almost trip over a shadow in the cement. I know he’s still standing there in the parking lot, empty and cold, watching my curled back fade into the night. Every time I flutter my eyes closed, just a millisecond of escape, he’s there — lashes low, his nose pressed against mine, his breath sweet on my lips.

_I just want you._


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i guess this chapter is more of an in-between moments of chaos? anyway sorry if it finishes a little abruptly, i was originally going to combine it with the next chapter but it was going to turn out to be a monster of a chapter like the last one so idk if i was ready to do that again (especially the massive editing) :))

It is convenient as it is that I get sick the days that come in the wake of the party.

The coming morning I did not even try to unwrap myself from the mess of my chlorine-scented bedsheets, twisted with my still-damp clothes haphazardly discarded upon my arrival. I’d stumbled into the dorm room, barely lucid as daybreak teased the the inky sky with the blooms of violet and rose just at the horizon. Levi’s mattress screeched irksomely as I clattered about for a dry t-shirt and boxers, and in the end I was too exhausted to even be rid of my wet clothes that I’d collapsed into bed, into a sleep swallowed by an oblivion dark and unforgiving, a depthless ocean where godless things dwelled. I’d awoken shivering, clad in just my boxers with my shirt twisted into handcuffs around my forearms from when I’d deliriously tried shedding it at night. 

I can just hear Levi flitting about the room, getting ready to go to his classes or just coming back from his classes or I don’t even know. I barely open my eyelids a sliver, sticky and sanded with the fevered tears I’d wept in my sleep —

“You shouldn’t have went,” Levi says, busying himself with stacking loose sheets of paper on his desk, not even looking at me.

I try to breathe in, but something is wrong — it’s like there’s a brick settled on my forehead, stifling all oxygen, my nose wet and stinging. I watch him fuss about for a bit, shifting and stacking and restacking everything, his bony knuckles blurring in my eyes as they streak through the air. He’s closed all of the window shutters — a gesture that feels pleasantly warming in my heart. But he’s left the softly glowing desk lamp on, radiating waves of acute pain, a shelling of molten bullets to my eyes and forehead. 

“I’m sick,” I croak, the words getting trapped in my constricted, scalding throat. I roll over to my other side to curl into the cool gloom of the wall, the whole world briefly tilting with the movement. Levi says something else, but it becomes warbled in the rush of my breath in my ears, in my skull that feels like it’s a kettle being held over a stove.

— 

I sleep again, slipping in and out of fevered dreams — locks of aureate hair trailing through my fingers; eyes the color of spring lighting in the sun and that pretty, dawn-pink mouth pressing against my collarbone, my stomach, my temple. The visions come in fragments, like stolen glances out the mirror — there and gone, no other reflection perfectly the same. 

It feels like late evening when I surface to the tangible world again, the quality of the air buttery and soft, hazy at the edges with shadows beckoning forward the deep of night. Levi sits at his desk, his legs impossibly folded beneath him in his chair, his dark head arched over a textbook. I’ve noticed how he’s pushed most of his furniture and belongings up against his side of the room, forming a clear demarcation from my contaminated end.

My throat feels like scorching claws are raking down its length; my head still feels hot and muffled, as if stuffed with cotton balls. Levi looks over at me blankly as I half-roll, half-fall out of my bed, stumbling towards the bathroom. 

I turn on the light — and this is a grand mistake, as its unforgiving glare blinds my fever-sensitive eyes for a few excruciating seconds, but I stick it out until they’ve stopped watering. I trip towards the sink, grabbing onto its narrow sides just before my face kisses the faucet. 

The mirror swims with the image of a wild, bedraggled boy: dark chasms beneath sticky, shadowy eyes; a chaotic froth of frizzy dark hair and the memory of warm-brown skin under a wash of lifeless ash. His eyes stare unsettlingly at me, two frozen ponds of umber. 

I bow my head to the sink, splashing the icy and metallic water onto my singeing face. The sudden bite of the water reminds me of —

The faucet screeches shut under my fingers, and I blindly grab for a towel, stuffing my dripping face into it. I let out a long, congested breath, turning to a groan in the dense fabric. 

After a minute I drop the towel from my face, catching a reflection in the mirror as I hang it up — 

There is a boy with haunted, caramel-soft eyes. His skin is sun-kissed, the sharp lines of his cheekbones and collarbones giving a benevolent sort of rawness to his face, like that of a curious fawn. He’s willowy but not weak; corded muscles thread between his ribs, the faint outline of which he trails down with his fingertips to his stomach. He looks up at me as his fingers come away from his skin stained with blooms of glistening blood. His lips turn ashen as they form a word, a name—

I stumble back from the mirror, nearly tripping into the shower as my trembling hands clutch my own stomach, that shadow of chalk-white that spills across my skin and wraps around my side. The pale tiles of the bathroom laugh and glisten at me, hallucinogenic under the arctic light of the ceiling light. The dampness on my face turns from water to sweat, the calm, cooling kiss of water from a minute before forgotten. I focus on every breath coming through my rubbed raw throat, every sip of the mint-tainted bathroom air is agony as it scrapes down the swollen tissue.

I gather myself from the side of the shower wall that I clutch onto with my sticky fingers, looking down at my feet as I shuffle back up to the sink. I’m ready to flinch back as my eyes crawl up the porcelain, up the metallic faucet and —

Dark hair, dark circles, dark eyes I’ve hated all my life. I look truly wrung out, raw and vulnerable as freshly scraped knees. My startled face in the mirror is drawn and waif-like, top teeth digging into my bottom lip. 

Drug of the fever or drug of the expired party it doesn’t matter; I hastily shut off the light and gently crack open the door, slipping out of the bathroom like nothing out of the usual has happened, that I’m not seeing wounded boys looking back at me from the mirror. Levi’s still at his desk studying, but my awareness has cleared up enough to see that the pencil in his hand has stilled completely in a way that means he’s acutely listening.

I drop back onto my bed, the aged mattress protesting. 

“Do you know what day it is?” Levi says, his voice pitched with a wary edge.

I fall back onto my bitter covers and groan, trapping a small pillow against my face.

“Today?” I say, muffled into the cotton. 

I hear more than see him turn around irksomely in his chair. “Adrian, I’m not fucking around.”

Hearing Levi swear is very much like biting into something hard when you’re eating something soft — it’s a surprise, quickly turning unpleasant as you realize its implications. I’m humbled for a moment that my actions were able to drive the mannerly-mouthed Levi to obscenity. It also means I’ve done something very, very screwed up.

“Look, Levi. Man. I’m sick. My throat is killing me. I don’t feel like I’m actively orbiting the sun right now.” I remove my pillow from my face to hiss out all of these words, or else I’d have to try shouting through the pain in my throat.

He sighs, dramatic and vexed; I can picture the moue coloring his thin, pale lips perfectly in my head without looking over to judge his expression. 

“Well, it’s been …” there’s a pause; he’s probably looking over at the clock just to be pretentious. “A day and a half since you’ve stumbled in here at around dawn a day before.”

I don’t reply; there’s nothing to say to the fact that the first day of this week has been completely wiped from my life, with my four classes and advising appointment. Judging by my current state of utter dishevelment, it looks like I can mark this whole coming week off of my calendar. 

“People have been talking. About the party.”

 _Ah._ The tactless buildup to the main affront. I try not to think about it, or I might combust into a million particles of distressed flame and cinders. I try not to think about it — _And he fucking loves you, of all the people._

I begin trembling again; I wrap myself in my sheets to the point of constriction, to still my body before all the loose bolts keeping me barely together fall out entirely.

“What have they been talking about?” I say carefully, my voice hardly a scrape of a shoe against cement. 

“There were … rumors. In which your name came up in a few times. But not as much as his, obviously.”

“What rumors. Levi.” I think my heart has stopped for a second in my chest, turning heavy as a stone lodged in my ribs. That dusty, opulent bathroom bathed in that sickening, pallid light swims to the surface of my mind; inky mascara smearing on my front, shrill cries echoing in my ears like the screeches of a winter raven. Since the moment my head had hit my pillow that night, all the promise of the aftermath has been blissfully erased from my brain; but now here it is, knocking at my door like the booming fist of the grim reaper come to collect my life. 

He hesitates, and I know he’s filtering information in that helplessly analytical way of his mind, judging the more supportive, cited facts against the rest. 

“It seems like the golden couple has had quite the breakup, and some are saying that you were in the middle of it.”

I laugh, which turns into a hysterical wheeze once it reaches my throat. I can feel Levi staring into the side of my head, trying to decipher just how far I’ve departed from sanity.

“How, exactly, was I in the middle of it all? Did anyone care to say?” Damage control, is what it is. Trying to see how much of the truth was leaked before I accidentally spill the whole entire cup of tea. 

I hear him hesitate, again, a sound like a little bird stuck in his throat. I want to go over to him and rattle him, break down that filter of his that’s gone into overdrive. I would, but I wouldn’t make it two steps before collapsing to the ground, or surviving the onslaught of lysol spray. 

“It’s … It really comes down to a question of sexuality.”

I close my eyes, tight, maybe tight enough to disappear from this world into the after promise of emotionless darkness. It’s the most natural answer to expect, yet somehow it’s jarring; to have the walls of a most intimate matter torn down around you. It never felt real to me, even less so now in retrospect — the party, the almost-kiss, the cold porcelain of the bathroom and the way the warmth of his body in the car just made me wish I could melt into his side. I don’t say anything to that; every time I open my mouth I’m just chewing on air, no two words connecting solidly on my tongue.

“Tell me what to think. I’ll take your word, Adrian.”

 _What to think_. I don’t know myself what to think. Every time the thought circles my head about what this all means for me … it’s like my mind shuts down, the possibility and impossibility of it all too much for the neuron circuits to process. I’m terrified, but right now in this moment, all I can think about is how much more terrified Oli must be. 

“You don’t think anything about it,” I say, mouth full of bedsheets, hardly a whisper. “You forget about it. Maybe they all will.”

— 

My fever comes back to sweep me off of my feet; even the Tylenol’s feeble attempts at reigning it doesn’t do anything to stop me from falling into the abyss of hot, achy sleep. In the lulls of its relentless grasps on my body I stumble over to the bathroom faucet to pour water down my raw throat, dizzy with dehydration. After more Tylenol and chugging the stale faucet water, I eventually begin to hit longer streaks of lucidity. 

It’s about midday when I shake the delirious sleep from my mind and body, the room deserted as Levi is likely at his classes. I finally take a cold shower and strip my sheets, saturated with sweat and lingering chlorine. I lay on my comforter for a while, drinking in the brisk autumnal air from a window I’ve cracked open, every breath easing clear my mind.

I should call him, or at least text him. To see how he’s holding up. Maybe he’s fled the country, something I’d explore the options of in his situation. 

I reach for the nightstand, but my hand just comes away empty with cough drop wrappers and wrinkled tissues. That’s when I remember my phone is non-existant, its brains shocked numb by the pool water. 

I roll back over and shove my face into a pillow, half-laughing, half-screaming. I wonder how many people think I’m actually dead; it’s definitely been a few days since there’s been any trace of me, anywhere. Reality is that really only Levi, Oli, and my dad are privy to my quiet existence — the last of which hardly calls me anymore, leaving only one person to make an effort for. 

Evening rolls around with a solution to one of my problems. Levi somehow fishes out an old phone from his friend (he has a friend besides me? _Amazing._ ) to let me use for the time being. I examine the phone he’s given me, a partially cracked dated model of an iPhone. The wallpaper is of some kind of a niche anime, the frilly-laced girl staring into me with her big, soulless eyes. 

“What the hell?” I say, waving the screen at Levi from across the room to show him the stain of adolescent obsession. He lifts his head just slightly from his own phone to glance apathetically at the screen, as if already knowing what to expect. 

“Be glad you have a phone, Adrian,” he says plainly as he looks back down, absently spritzing some more lysol my way. 

I roll my eyes but get to work, tapping my fingers impatiently on the screen as the instagram download buffers on for an eternity. It finally installs and I open it up right away and log in into my neglected account, my fingers searching up the name before my mind processes what I’m doing.

The account pops up before I’m even done typing, clearly given its popularity — the fact that he has fifteen thousand followers is kind of frightening, honestly. He has his whole name written out in his bio, and I’m unsurprised to see that his full last name is a melodious, hyphenated mess. Just below he has a little Brazilian flag and the words _I could eat the world raw_ following. _ASU track_ with his graduation year fills the last line. 

All the pictures distract me from the real task, a visual diary to his life fallen open in my hands. The latest one is of him leaning against Alex’s pickup with the rest of his roommates in front of his favorite diner, coolly drinking a milkshake as he’s the only one that looks straight into the camera, looking effortlessly graceful and charismatic as he always does. I smile at the caption: _hope my mom doesnt see this lol_

It was posted just a little bit from over a month ago, which I realize is just before he started going out with Allura. 

There’s definitely a lot of posts of him running or leaping or just lounging by the track. My favorite one is where he has his head tipped back after a clear victory, an exhilarated smile on his face, his eyes closed in a moment of pure joy, pure satisfaction in himself. It’s the enlarged version of his profile picture, and I take a few moments to study every stroke of his face, an expression meant to be carved for a museum, for history. 

I scroll down, down, down, past his announcement of his commitment to Aegean State, to the posts that gradually become less stylish and flamboyant, more so formal and posed. 

There are the countless podium finishes, gold medals held in his honey fingers and pinned paper numbers popping up all over the picture grid. He’s standing at the lookout on the Eiffel Tower, in front of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, crouching by the side of a kangaroo in Melbourne. 

It’s always a false impression of easiness that his loose, unbothered curls give, his warm skin painted lovingly by the sun, those soft lips teasingly turned up at the corners. I’ve learned to look for it now, the subtle creases of unhappiness that ghost his face: his amber eyes a few hues darker, the tight crinkles at the corners of his mouth and the slight slant of his pensive brows. 

There’s just one picture of him and his mother, quite far down enough that he looks a noticeably different, softer and wilder version of himself. He’s maybe fourteen or so, his curls even longer and more unruly and his dimples more so pronounced in his cheeks, lingering with a childish plumpness. His mother stands partway behind him, her chin placed on her son’s shoulder as she has her arms wrapped partially around his chest. They’re standing on the prow of an impressive yacht somewhere, a sea of the perfect shade of turquoise glistening behind them in the heavy gold light of late afternoon. The same shade of curls as Oli’s flit behind her in the gentle breeze, the same eyes stare at the camera but keener and colder than I’m used to seeing. 

_te amo_ , he wrote in the caption. By far the shortest one I’ve seen. 

There’s nothing of his father, and the only other face of his family that appears is someone that could be his grandmother. There’s a string of indecipherable Portuguese below the picture, which makes me think it was meant for his family after all. 

Some part of me feels rotten and criminal, for listing so far back into his life on my own accord, even though it’s for the world to see. I finally force myself to open the direct messages, only to stare at the cursor blinking back at me in the empty box. 

What do I even write? _Sorry for disappearing? Sorry for ruining your relationship and possibly exposing your sexuality?_

With Oli it’s always been about speaking aloud, of words rolling effortlessly of off your tongue and feeling the warm lilt of the reply sink into your skin. It’s his vivacity, his authenticity and emotion that cannot transcend the staleness of brightly lit screens with their overly-proofed sentences.

I sigh and shut the phone off, the empty cursor still winking behind my closed eyelids.

“Have you seen him at all?” I say to Levi, dropping the phone defeatedly into the mess of bedsheets. 

He looks up at me from behind his phone, seeming to judge my words, his words that churn in his eyes behind the rims of his glasses.

“Yes,” he says, pressing his lips thoughtfully together after the word. “He caught me right outside the lecture hall after bio. He was asking about you.”

My mouth feels dry, my heart heavy beneath my ribs. “What did you say?” I ask, faintly.

Levi sits up, his bed creaking uncomfortably beneath him, reflecting his uneasiness. 

“I said you were sick,” he says, carefully. 

“Did he say anything else … about the party or anything?”

“No, but he said he wants to talk to you. And that your phone is dead,” he says pointedly, motioning in the vague direction of my replacement. “I wasn’t going to bring him up here though, for many reasons.”

“It’s alright; I get it.” Honestly, I’m not sure I’m mentally prepared to see him yet, especially if I can’t type out a single cohesive sentence to him. “I’m surprised he’s still going to lectures.”

“He’s not,” Levi says flatly. “I think he’s lying low for a bit; there’s somewhat of an uproar still. Just when I think we’ve gotten over it, there’s a new rumor razing the grounds.”

It’s not hard to guess who keeps kindling the flames, drawing out the blaze only to warm her frozen soul. A selfish part of me is glad that I’ve been completely removed from the stream of campus chatter, that I’m holed up in this bunker as the fallout continues to rain down upon the world. It’s a nauseating thought, though, to know that Oli is and has always been the intersection of everyone’s attention; yes, it comes with exhilarating rises to glory but the most devastating falls from grace. I want to pull him into this oblivious cocoon of mine, yet I’ve grown terrified of the thought of him, of how to even begin to act around him.

“Thank you,” I say at last. “For telling me.” Even though I’m not sure he would have shared this at all with me if I hadn’t asked.

Levi shrugs, and goes back to awkwardly staring at his phone, even though I can see how his eyes are blank and unprocessing, just wanting to escape from this conversation. 

A few minutes pass, and then: “You know, I never thought that there was a chance that you would get involved in something like this.”

I lean my head against the cold plaster of the wall, its frigid bite against my skull steadying my rocking heart. “I didn’t either. Until I met him.”

— 

Day five or six of my confinement.

I’ve only just gone out with Levi to eat a full meal in the dining hall, the food tasting ashy and stale on my tongue. I stood outside our dorm building for about ten minutes afterwards, squinting at the dappled sun through the fiery leaves of the oak tree above me. It felt nice to be outside, except every time someone would pass by, I would startle, feeling illicit and tarnished, my hands stained with the blood of a murder I wasn’t sure I committed. No one made any note of me though as I swayed in the chilly late afternoon, the world burning around me as the sun dipped, illuminating everything in a startling orange. 

I came back to my dorm and crawled into bed, and stared emptily at a textbook propped up against a pillow until I felt like my eyes would bleed. It was about ten when I’d given up, deciding to reread a book I’d brought with me from home. Levi continued to grind through Reimann sums at his desk, although I could feel his attention tangibly fuzzing like the lamplight in the corner of my eyes.

There’s a knock on the door, and we both turn to stare at the weary wood in quiet surprise. I hear Levi rustling to get up.

“I’ll get it —”

“No it’s fine, I’ll go —”

I rise a little unsteadily from the bed, my limbs still tired and wrung from whatever awful cold, flu, mental exhaustion I’ve had plague me. At ten at night it could really be anyone or no one knocking at our door, but there is a tiny pinch in my stomach that tells me who it is before I open it. 

_Fuck._

He stands there so casually, hands shoved into the pockets of his track sweatshirt, hair falling carelessly over part of his face as he stares down at his sneakers as he waits for the door to open. He looks up at me, tilting his head so that the wisps of his hair slide lackadaisically out of his eyes. 

Seeing him again in life makes me realize the tragedy of never getting to see the lambent, breathing versions of the most decorated portraits persevered by our history. To try capture such brilliance and divinity in brushstrokes of paint ... would be impossible. 

“Hey,” I say, my voice barely a wisp of sound. It’s still nasally from the cold, but the drawn timbre in it makes it sound even more guttural. 

Oli smiles, but it’s a little fainter around the edges than usual, just a fading ember from the flame. 

“Hey,” he finally says back, his voice low and soft, melted caramel. “I hope I didn’t wake you up or anything.”

“Oh, not at all.” I slide myself through the sliver between door and threshold, closing out Levi’s perked stare and leaning back against the wood to block out the room behind me. There’s not much privacy in the corridor since everyone seems to stir around this time, darting from door to door like mice, but having this conversation in my room sounds even more so unappealing. 

“Do you want to go watch a movie?” Oli says, a little abruptly despite the gentleness of his voice. I focus on his hands shoved in the pockets of his sweatshirt, clearly knotted in the fabric, as I try to find my footing. 

“It’s late,” I whisper at last, beginning with the obvious.

“Are you planning at going to classes tomorrow?” He shoots back, raising his eyebrows wryly.

“I’ll get you sick.” I switch tactics, but I know there’s no way around Oli when he’s adamant on something, impenetrable as the Trojan wall. 

He’s still smiling slightly when he says, “I’ve already been not feeling so well this whole week.”

I want to say we’re at a stalemate, except I already know who will be the first to break. I sigh and tip my head back against the door, running a hand through my hair in thought. I can feel how he’s trying not to watch me, but even he doesn’t know just how electrifying his inconspicuous attention can be.

“Alright,” I say, finally, in a breath through my teeth. “Just — just let me get my coat.” I awkwardly step away from the door so that I can open it, trying to slip around his proximity. He seems to blink in mild surprise, as if not expecting the result to come so easily.

“Of course,” he says, stepping out of the way to give me room. 

I slip inside, pattering towards a pile of clothes on a chair I hadn’t bothered sorting this whole week. I fish out my coat, struggling to change it back from twisted its inside-out state, and a scarf that I wrestle out from the pile, which causes an avalanche of half of the clothes. I can feel Levi’s bemused stare at the back of my head, so I say to the chair, “I’m going out.”

“Aren’t you sick?”

I turn around as I messily loop the scarf around my neck. “Yes, that’s why I’m taking the scarf.” It’s definitely not cold enough to warrant one, but really it’s more of a shield for my awkwardness, great for ducking my face into. 

Levi shrugs, and I know that he wants to stop me because he knows who is on the other side of that door, but he seems to draw back just as he opens his mouth.

“Don’t wake me up when you come back,” he says, turning back to his textbook.

It’s as much of a ‘have fun’ as I can expect from him, so I go to leave, almost forgetting my funky replacement phone on the way out.

“What movie are we seeing?” I say a little breathlessly, as I shut the door behind me and we start down the mildewy hall. 

Oli shrugs. “I don’t know. We’ll see once we get there.”

It clicks in my head that my cognition has truly left me in the past week; up until this moment I was almost convinced we were going to go see a movie for the sake of seeing one. But now I know it’s an invitation for escape, an anonymous dark room for whispered secrets. 

“Alright,” I say, a little faintly. My mind is galloping now to catch up with everything, the memory of my last time with Oli jarring me like resuming a film from the moment of its climax. Everything from that night was put on pause for me after I washed up on the fevered shores of the following days. 

_I just want you to stay._

I shiver from the memory of his words, the cold rattle of my body masked as we step outside. We walk in silence towards the bus stop, drowning in what we want to say but unable to shape our thoughts into words, which trickle like sand through our fingers, our hands empty before we even ungrasp them.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> short but sweet. i've been wanting to write this part for so long, you don't even know. i think i actually began writing fragments of it right after the first or second chapter, so in all realness i cannot believe i've made it far enough to actually use these pieces. thank you again from the very bottom of my heart for everyone and anyone who is still here, somehow still reading this <3  
> thankfully i'm also on a few days of thanksgiving break (woohooooo) so i'll finally (hopefully) get to write a bit more consistently. except i recently got distracted by a short retelling of the myth of icarus but luckily i was able to finish that today and emotionally wreck myself with my own writing (because who isn't a masochist when it comes to portraying a tragedy?? maybe it's just me lol)

It’s past eleven by the time we make it to the theater, the front deserted but for the phantoms of glowing faces on the illuminated movie posters and the lone cashier, zombied by the glacial light of his phone. We arrive just in time for the last showing, a movie I’ve neither seen nor ever heard of — the title doesn’t even stick in my head past the first glance at the listings behind the cashier. The whisper of Oli’s credit card sliding through the window and the absurdly-loud whine of the ticket-printing machine beats me to comprehension. 

“Will I ever get to pay for my own ticket?” I ask tiredly, but a smile feathers against the top of my scarf.

“No,” he says simply, handing me my ticket, still sticky with the comforting aroma of freshly-pressed ink. “I’ll be forever indebted for the time you put aside to help me study.”

“I think it was more than just studying,” I say quietly. He slips me his tricky smile and holds the door open for me, to the stuffy and buttery-smelling lobby. 

The concession stand is lifeless, its service exhausted for the earlier crowds. We’re likely the only two people here. 

It’s not even a big theater, rather a cozy, vintage memory of the fifties. Yet it feels liminal and undefined under the inky press of the almost-midnight sky at the tall entrance windows, the dusty corners laden with soulful, heavy shadows. It’s all old velvet and checkered carpet, decades of singed butter and the lingering chemical breath of film nitrate. 

We walk to one end of the theater before we turn around and go to the other, only locating our showing by the timestamp reflected on our tickets. Most other movies have ended or are just about to end; we get startled by a door that spills out a few late stragglers after the end of a showing, their eyes beady from a wearying storyline, skittering to the exit with their hushed conversations. It seems they were the last wisp of presence, as we don’t see anyone else, even when we slip into our auditorium. 

It’s one of the smaller, older rooms — intimate and twilit, the last preliminary reel before the start of the film just fading out as we find a place to sit in the empty theater. I simply drift after Oli, who decides to occupy the middle of one of the higher rows.

“What are we even watching?” I whisper despite us being the only ones there, my voice creaking just like the chair I’ve settled in. 

I see him shrug beside me, his whole body painted in monochrome from the light of the opening credits on the screen. “I don’t know. Something meant to be seen at night.”

It ends up being something about space; wistful and conceptual, little dialogue and a chilling score. My lips keep catching on air, feeling like I should say something, anything to sketch the purpose of this night — but Oli stays silent beside me, pensive and haunting, leaning his shoulders and head against the back of his chair so that he's turned just a little towards me. Every time I pretend to be watching the movie I feel his eyes ghosting over my face, and every time I look over to him, the ridges of his cheeks illuminated in soft grey and blues, his eyes dark under his lashes as he watches the screen, it’s like I’ve been imagining the wisps of his attention. 

Then, at one point, minutes or hours in he does that thoughtful little sigh of his, and then — 

“You know, I’ve been looking for you,” he says quietly, his voice too solid to just be a whisper. I look over at him, startled by the sudden statement. His attention is still on the screen, eyes hooded but watchful. He’s curled up slightly in his chair, so that his cheek is resting against the side like he’s going to drift off soon, except that there is nothing sleepy in his voice. 

“I’m sorry. I know I should’ve reached out but … I just wasn’t quite there,” I say. I’ve been so caught off guard, and worst of all — the guilt creeps in like a fire singeing the edges of my heart, a poison to rot my thoughts. It crossed my mind hundreds of times that he must be going through shit, but I felt as helpless as someone standing on a thinly frozen pond, the ice threatening to crack under my foot no matter which direction I try stepping in. 

“No, not that,” he says, sounding tired, eternally exhausted for the first time. “All the places I’ve been, all the people I’ve met … I’ve always felt empty, despite it all. An echo of a sound I’ve longed my whole life to hear.”

He doesn’t look away from the screen as he says this, his words overlaying the soft dialogue in the movie, echoing the same wistful quality. I’ve never heard him speak like this, with such rawness about his life; it has a numbing effect on me, leaving my tongue feeling too heavy to lace together a reply, my mind sticky and slow as honey. 

“And then there was you, and I didn’t even know you but as the boy through the fence — face ducked and marching purposefully along the track, counting paces as if you were headed to some reluctant battle. Yet from that moment you’ve haunted me; you’ve haunted my dreams, you’ve haunted my soul — I close my eyes at night and I see you looking back on the other side.”

He has his lashes lowered, his closed eyelids pale petals in the light — as if he’s lost between the darkness of the theater and the darkness of his mind, between the version of me that inhabits the space beyond his eyelids and the shadow of that beside him. My head tips towards his, all of my lifeblood exhausted by his words, a dream collapsing. We’re looking at each other through shuttered lashes, almost nose-to-nose when I say —

“You’ve been haunting my dreams my whole life.”

He trips into me, that final stretch — his kiss is like coming home, of seeing a long-lost face in a crowd, of remembering what someone’s hand feels like in yours after an eternity apart. Of remembering something that you’ve just about forgotten, the breath of memory fizzing out at the edge of your mind until it is reeled back into sharp, heart-stopping vividness. I’ve only ever felt his touch in the battlefields of my dream, in the murky, delirious crevice between sleep and reality — and now the realness of him is so electrifying I might be set aflame; his lips so warm and firm on mine that I might just melt out from under him.

It’s only after we break apart I realize that I’m crying, feeling the warmness trellis down my cheeks, the arctic light of the screen a salty blurriness in my eyes. I feel him make a move and then hesitate, but finally he grabs my hand and holds it, wrapping it in the soft flame of his. I don’t know how to begin looking at him, but I tip my head against his shoulder, feeling his curls brush my wet cheeks, the misty scent of eucalyptus clinging to the curve of his neck.

We don’t say anything for the remainder of the movie; there is only sound between us of the susurrus of our anxious breaths and the soft dialogue of the film. At one point he lifts our twined hands and holds the back of mine to his lips, the warmth and velvet softness of them so lovely that it’s dizzying to my mind. I spend the rest of our time in the theater teetering over the edge of blissful insanity that comes with knowing that I’m here, beside him, with the lingering sweetness of his mouth intertwining with the salt of dry tears; with every bone beginning at the back of my hand melting in a cascade of sticky warmth at his ever-present touch. Some deep, eternal part of me feels fulfilled, as if I’ve done everything that I was meant to in my time on this earth. As if I’ve found the other half of my soul that I’ve been unknowingly searching for all along.

The screen goes dark but for the end credits, white letters drifting in the pitch black like electric snow. I feel him move again and his mouth is on mine once more, this time swift and purposeful under the curtain of darkness. He pulls away before I can hopelessly finish falling into it again, before I get lost in that magnetizing realm between our lips. 

The lights gradually come on, setting the room aglow in a dusty gold. Oli stands and brings me up with him, his hair a little more disheveled than usual, his cheeks flushed with a brush of rosiness. I almost trip a few times as he weaves us through the row of chairs, down the steps and to the exit. He is there to catch and steady me every time my feet betray me, briefly undoing our clasped hands to gently wrap an arm around my brittle shoulders. 

We’re outside and exposed under the raw blanket of cold night sky, the warmth still fluttering inside of me combatting the frigid fingers of the air clawing to penetrate me. There is not a soul around; even the moon has been shuttered by the cover of a cloud. It’s just us, alone, with the world to ourselves. We still don’t speak though, and his hand never leaves from mine — only to stop to patiently loop my scarf around my neck, for my fingers are too detached, too numb to do so.

We begin walking through the deserted town, hand in hand. The glow of the streetlights seems wan and brittle against the inky darkness of the night, the air so brisk that it feels like the bitter promise of snow, except it’s so rare here that I can’t bring myself to expect it. Everything around us seems forbidding and ominous, especially given the lack of people; yet the stark atmosphere cannot invade us however it tries, for as long as we are side by side we present a stubborn, lively flame that cannot be extinguished. 

Oli suddenly stops in a pool of dusky light, his hand gently tethering mine still so that I stop as well, turning towards him. He looks down at our interlocked fingers like they’re just another mystery of the universe. 

“We can just forget about it all tomorrow, if you want,” he says, his voice flat and distant, lifeless as the streets around us. “It doesn’t have to happen.”

“No,” I say, without a pause, without a thought, my voice hardly more than a whisper, “I want it to.” 

I step towards him and lean my forehead against his, closing my eyes so all that inhabits my senses is the giddying burn of his skin against mine. I feel our lips brush each other’s like two butterflies fluttering against one another, sparking bright with promise in the wisp of the touch. I step away, reluctantly drawing my eyes open. 

And there it is: a smile like the timid sun breaking over the horizon, the first golden rays after a long winter night. I feel my lips echo the shape, but only his were made to hold something so bright and pure.

He winds his hand through mine again, surely this time, the fledgling of our fate sealed between our fingers.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ahhhhh it's been so long since i've updated i'm so sorry <3 finals came and swept my mind away completely and then the holidays came and well... you know.  
> i hope this doesn't show how rusty i am after a little hiatus but honestly i am just so happy to get to be able to write again you can't believe how nice it is to give my mind a break from chemistry :p

I was terrified that first day, going back to classes after everything.

_Everything._

The bitter chlorine, the fever-stained bed, the dark theater with its hazy warmth and unwatched films echoing into the shadows. His lips on mine, my lips on his. _You’ve haunted my dreams._

Our first classes were nearly in separate ends but he walked with me to mine in the morning, his hair still damp and sweet from the shower mist after his morning training, his cheeks stained like dawn from his earlier exertion. It’s a miracle that he makes it anywhere on time with me; I think only Oli can charm the world to give him a few extra minutes at my side.

He slips his hand into mine, a spilling of warmth in my palm as we walk in the weave of buildings on the campus. I thrilled myself earlier into imagining that there would be some sort of reaction from the general crowd, and when there was — the sideways glances, the secretive smiles and outright gapes — I’d almost forgotten how to breathe.

“I’m here,” his breath brushes my ear, gentle and sweet as a summer breeze. He’d whispered it yesterday when we’d lain across from each other in the dark, our hands catching on each other’s across the expanse of the sheets. He’d whispered it the day before when we’d walked home from the theater, when we’d just reached the stairs to my place and I began to shudder into him, cut raw by the release of every emotion I’ve ever had for him, unspooled. He whispers it now, when I’m trembling in his hand like a fledgling bird. 

“I should have decided to be sick for another day,” I say under my breath. We’re crossing one of the crowded courtyards, collecting contrails of glances in our wake.

“What happened to studying?” I don’t need to look over to see that coy smile of his — it’s there in his words, in the quick squeeze of his hand. But I do, because for this moment in time, this place in the universe, I know that he is mine to admire, mine to openly adore.

“You,” I say, the word barely stronger than the breeze that lovingly plays its fingers through his hair, the curls that I finally ran my hands through yesterday many times, a dream I didn’t know I was chasing until that moment. “You happened.”

He laughs, sweet and tripping, magnetizing the surrounding eyes. I watch his mouth, wanting to trace its joyous shape, but — later. 

“No excuses now,” he says, that jovial lilt still on his tongue. “I’m only keeping you around as long as you’re helping me with my homework.”

I’m just about to stop outside of the door to my class but he keeps leading me past it by the tether of his hand, to just around the corner and into the towering shadow of a dusty pillar in one of the less-populated walkways of the courtyard. My watch reads just a couple of minutes until the start of my class, but maybe he’ll be able to trick the time again.

He lets go of my hand but in a few seconds catches my cheek with his hand, the warmth stoked between our palms now seeping into my morning-chilled skin. I close my eyes at his touch, trying to drink in this new, dizzying, exhilarating feel of his closeness — and in the next moment I sense the flame of his lips on mine, pressing into me with all of his light like the instant rays of sunshine through the crevice of a door. 

He’s there and gone before I even open my eyes, still stuck tripping into that infinite bliss like I always do with him there. It’s a brief kiss, more of a wordless parting that I’ve come to understand as something of his thing. I don’t mind it, but that memory of him on my lips after he leaves always ruthlessly teases me until the next moment I see him. 

“I’ll find you for lunch,” he says, his words just brushing my face, standing close enough that either of us can fall back into each other. His eyes on mine are a bloom of every color of summer — every time I look at them I find a new hue, a lovely spilling between green and brown.

“The sycamore?” I whisper, having to remember how to shape words properly. 

He nods slightly, a clutch of his curls brushing my temple. “Study hard, Adrian,” he whispers back, stepping away, but not before brushing a thumb over the shiver of my cheekbone. 

In a flutter of my eyes he’s gone, his turquoise-clad back a receding wash of color among the stragglers. Every time he leaves, it always feels like I’ve imagined it, a product of a sugared dream — yet my lips still taste sweet from his, the flame of my cheeks still burns at the memory of his touch. I feel the weight of his electric gaze as he looks back, once, but I’m already turning to walk in the opposite direction before he sees me lingering, with that foolish bite of a smile on my lips knowing that it’s all real, real as day. 

I make it to my class somehow only three minutes late, with Levi looking at me with the same spirit as seeing a ghost. I slip into the seat next to him just as the chalk in the professor’s hand touches the blackboard, numbers spilling forth that I already know aren’t going to make much sense to me. 

“I thought you got kidnapped or something yesterday,” Levi whispers, his words masked by the squeal of the chalk.

“My bad. I should’ve texted you.” Levi was the last thing on my mind last night, and my replacement phone is actually dead because I forgot to charge it. I also realize I’ve forgotten my calculus notebook as my hands come out empty from my haphazardly packed bag. Clearly, I’m just one big _out of order_ sign, but Levi keeps pushing. 

“Is this going to be the new norm? Because if so, I could really get used to you not clamoring in through the door at three in the morning.”

I snort at his remark, but my mind’s gone before I can think to formulate a response. 

Yesterday evening swept me along much with the force of inclement weather — I’d gone over to Oli’s apartment late in the afternoon to do much of nothing, just sprawl on the musty carpet with him to watch whatever show one of his roommates was watching while methodically going through the fridge for edible items. We were still so awkward with each other, for the most part I was — this was all so bizarre, so new to me; I’d reinvented what I thought was my sexuality in the past twenty-four hours, even though retrospectively it was a long road on which I’d just realized where I was headed all along. I payed more attention to our hands pressed into the carpet than whatever we were watching, a rift of only two inches between our pinkies feeling broader than the Pacific Ocean. We clinked against each other like the most fragile china — every word careful and calculated, the mechanics of every movement painstakingly thought out so as not to accidentally shatter the other. 

Then at one point Oli had caved to the tension in the air, since being careful was not in his nature as much as the wind did not know what it was like to be still.

“You haven’t seen my room yet,” he’d said casually, words lighter than air. His roommate flicked his eyes at him with no more heed than at a fly, and I decided to take the hint to follow as Oli gracefully rose from my side. 

He closed his door once we’d stepped into the surprisingly sparse room, throwing himself down dramatically on his half-made bed. For someone with a personality and life as dynamic as his, there wasn’t much in his predominately white room to speak for his character — just some clothes thrown over a nondescript chair, a textbook laying questionably in a corner. 

“Well that was fucking awkward,” he’d said. He’d turned his head and smiled at me from behind the ripple of his sheets, bright and warm and filling as sunlight. “But when something is real it cannot be perfect.”

I came to sit on the edge of his bed, hesitantly, cringing when the mattress squealed under my weight. 

“How do you know that?” I’d sighed, focused on pulling on a loose thread on one of my shirt sleeves since looking directly at him was too much — he was the sun, and all I could think about was going blind with my infatuation.

“Didn’t you already know? I’m wise beyond my years.” 

I felt the shift of the bed behind me, sinking under the press of his body as he rolled towards me. There was just the barest creak of the bed as he’d sat up. Just a moment later his hands had snaked in from behind me to lay them on my fidgeting hands, butterflies of gold wrapping my fingers into a calm. I’d closed my eyes to the grounding kiss of his skin on mine, tilting my head back so that his cheek came to rest beside mine where he’d lain his chin on my shoulder. It was then that I’d realized that somehow, inexplicably, we fit together like two pieces of a puzzle, like it was meant to be this way all along. 

“I’d never had anything like this before,” I’d murmured, my head flooding with only the thought of the press of his skin against mine, igniting my hands, my cheek, my whole being. “In any sense.”

He sighed against me, the sound soaking into me through where we were held together, seamless. “It doesn’t make a difference. I’ve never had anything like you. We’ve never had anything like each other.”

His words were of some comfort, but still, I was truly terrified with where I — we — were going, where we already were. I’d never even kissed a girl, or had a girlfriend — long legs and miniskirts in high school were just as about interesting to me as a fence post. Girls had always seemed somewhat intimidating to me in the way that a complex work of art could be; I did not know where to even begin looking to interpret the meaning behind every brushstroke, to try to deduce the greater purpose without coming across as an uncultured fool. I only knew enough to respect the masterpiece, not understand it. I’d spent my high school years thinking that college would be different, that I’d fall prey to the wondrous attraction of the female being that all the boys around me seemed defenseless against — except there wasn’t even the time for that to happen before I’d inexplicably found it in another boy. I’d never even considered that there was a possibility that I could be anything but straight, yet here we were. 

“I’m glad you’re my first.”

“Me too.” 

He laced his fingers through mine, always flowing through the crevices of my hands like honey. He then rolled back to lay down on his bed again, bringing me down with him as I gave a startled laugh. 

We’d laid side by side like that, fingers laced, and my eyes had strayed to his ceiling — and there was the mark of his life on this room. Rows and rows of photographs were plastered to his ceiling above his bed, so many that the colors seemed to flow between each picture to form one vibrant mosaic of moments. I’d recognized some landmarks while others seemed curiously obscure; all the minuscule faces of people peering down at me appearing unknown yet somehow significant within their respective frames, full of stories.

“Are all of these yours?”

I’d felt him study my face from the side as my lips traced the question, even though I already knew the answer. 

“Yes — this is what I wanted to show you. I planned to take more here but I’d left my camera at home, and no one’s really there to send it back to me.” 

His words registered in my ears just when it’d crossed my mind that there wasn’t a single photograph from his time here. At least I knew now what to get him for Christmas, that is though if I would find the money. Maybe he’d like a disposable. 

“I’d never imagined that you’d be into photography,” I’d said softly, as I’d traced every picture with my eyes, getting lost in the places within. 

“What, because I’m a jock?” His words were still light, playful; yet I knew they held that careful edge within where he was waiting to see my reaction after showing me this unexpected piece of his soul. If only I’d known how to lace together the proper words to tell him just how mesmerized, how in love I was by this side of him. 

“No … it’s just … amazing. That you’ve been to all of these places and known all of these people and you care to collect these moments. It’s beautiful, Oli; it really is.”

I knew he was smiling, the one complete with dimples — I’d turned my head to the side to face him, and he’d pressed his nose against mine. 

“Be glad I’ve forgotten my camera. Or we’d be working on getting you all over the ceiling.” I felt the breath of his words against my face, sweet and soft. I could only think to lean into it, to fall into that promise his lips always held, sweeter than a fresh spring blossom. 

We spent a long time like that — heads tilted together on the same pillow, nearly pressed up nose to nose, just talking. I’d asked him about every picture, and he’d sketch the tale of each. _This, and this, and this_. He loved to tell the details of each moment; the tripping cadence of someone’s voice, the smell of elderflower in the little cafe he’d stumbled upon in Europe. I’d lived through the intimate moments he had preserved on film, so many and vast that it was like he’d gathered them across a collection of multiple lives. 

“I have this thing where sometimes I dream of certain places, so vividly and tangibly that I can’t separate the memories of my dreams from the memories of my life,” he’d admitted when we’d gone through them all, and by then he’d sung me into staying with him into the night after neither of us could seem to let go of one another despite the late hour. “So I need a way to keep track of what is real. To stay sane.” 

I’d been so tired at that point, my eyes sticky and lips so warm from his, that my reply had doused on my tongue as I had begun to slip across the fuzzy threshold of sleep. I’d wanted to tell him that we were victims to the same condition, that my nights were spent trapped in a realm of walls and chariots and wrathful deities that could scrape the sky raw. Yet when I fell asleep next to him that night, for the first time in a while I found that I couldn’t dream. Maybe because I was living in one. 

— 

“Honestly, I can’t say that I’m surprised.”

Levi and I were walking towards the university green after our morning classes, which for the most part were already lost from my memory before they’d even registered there. Missing a week felt as detrimental as missing a month, and my very brain ached at the concept of throwing myself back into the throes of studying. 

We stop at the edge of the sidewalk, where we’re about to split our own ways — but neither of us move, rather we just watch the figure perched on the bench some ways away across the grass. A gaggle of other boys surround him, all lithe and athletic as him; yet there’s that quality of holiness that clings to him even at this distance, the one that draws the eye at seeming apart from the waking world, preternatural.

“Surprised about what?” I say carefully, drawing out my words as I do when I’m not keen on hearing the reply. Oli was telling me yesterday how the boys on his team had rallied to his side when everything broke out, that the reason that much of the original commotion stirred up by Allura had died down was due to their quick work of putting everyone’s mouths and noses where they belonged. Yet still she spun her venomous tales about him, a spider clinging untouched to its web — so Oli’s boys stood fast at his side, even now, out in the middle of a great lawn. It warmed my heart, the collective gesture catching me unexpected. 

“That you and him. Are a thing. I’ve never seen you look at a single girl the way that you look at him.”

I turn to Levi, surprised myself now by his sentiment. I never realize that I spend my idle time staring at Oli until I am _not_ staring at him anymore.

“And how do I look at him?” I feel my lips shaping the air into the words but it’s hard to say if I put sound behind them. The fact that to others it’s so plain, so obvious, is terrifying — I didn’t realize how hard I’d fallen for him until I’d hit the ground.

Levi turns to me, and there’s a glint of something in his eye, almost like a sort of an awe. “Like you’ve been searching for something your whole life, and you’ve found it — the purpose."

I feel my cheeks turning stove-hot, but I’m saved the reply when a movement catches the corner of my eye — it’s Oli, sliding off the bench in one graceful leap now that he’s noticed me, his head tilted in beckoning.

“I — I gotta go,” I mumble to Levi. I know a smirk without needing to see one, but some part of me is glad that he seems to care, despite everything — I was worried he would be irked again at how I’d taken to being around Oli every waking moment, but he seemed to take it with grace, even with a certain joy. I think he just needed the justification for his painfully logical mind. 

It’s hard not to skip to Oli across the grass like an overjoyed school girl, to flock to his light like a moth blind by the luminescence of a lamp. How do I stay so composed, when he meets me halfway, wrapping an arm over my shoulder so that I trip into the feel and smell and warmth of him, that I’d know with my eyes closed, with my mind departed from this world? How do I not melt in his grasp when he whispers in my ear that he’s missed me, that he’s been thinking about me all of this morning, that he’ll be thinking about me all of this afternoon until we’re tangled together again, two vines on a trellis? I let him lead me towards our hangout spot by the tree, focusing on keeping my feet from starting to float off of the ground in the wake of my joy — for he makes me feel like anything is possible in this world, that I could walk on air if I wanted to. 

The rest of the boys — there’s about five of them — nod at me and then casually begin to disperse, some even offering small talk about classes and all, the usual. I can see how they want to linger, drifting about for reasons to draw Oli and me into a conversation; yet the intentioned grasp of Oli’s arm around me speaks enough for itself, as does the absent way he brushes his nose against my hair, distracted. Still, there is a certain warmth within me knowing that I’ve been accepted into their ranks, whether it is only because of him or not. 

“They’re good people,” Oli says, tracing my line of sight as I watch their backs recede into the distance across the lawn. 

“They must be if they’re still sticking up for you like this,” I say quietly. 

“They’re like family, really,” he says thoughtfully, turning to me to brush a small leaf from my hair. That sole movement seems to gravitate all of my attention, but his words still peel through the haze. “When I first came here, they were all I had for a bit.”

It hurt my heart how for a long time, he was so, so, alone. You’d think he’d have all of the friends in the world, especially how effortlessly he could magnetize anyone with that innocent charisma of his — not to mention his talents, bordering on divine. Yet just how the moon shines so bright in the night yet it is alone among the stars, it was difficult for him to find that myth of intimacy because to all of us he just seemed so … unattainable. 

We have our little haven to ourselves now, so we both go to the bench — I lay my head in his lap while I work on memorizing carbon skeletons out of a textbook, while he works on memorizing the feel of my hair in his fingers. I should get him to read up on the endocrine system for our next exam in bio, but I can’t convince myself to escape this bliss I’ve tumbled into — the pleasant whisper of his fingers tangling through my hair and that missed clarity of mind finally in return. _Ethane, propane, acetate_ ; catching in my head like snowflakes in lashes. 

So we stay like that for a while, silent in words but not feelings, until the sun turns and its warming spill settles over us. With it comes the memory of summer, and now I’m shrugging out of my sweater, my midriff tingling under the unexpected kiss of air. 

I feel his fingers brush over my skin, just below where my shirt has shrugged up slightly — I know without having to look that it’s where the milky white spill of my peculiar birthmark is. 

“This,” he says, as his fingers dance over the exposed strip of my skin, “I’ve wondered about this.”

“What about it?” My mouth feels dry, my skin starting to burn under the whisper of his fingers. It’s always been an ugly, bothersome aspect of my body — annoyingly spanning and shapeless, an especially stark and unsettling pigment of chalk-white against darker skin. It looks about as gruesome as the memory of a severe wound.

“There’s this myth I’ve heard, where the shape of your birthmark is a reflection of how you’ve died in your past life,” Oli says thoughtfully as he traces the outline of it on my stomach, leaving streaks of hot and cold in the wake of his finger. “I would imagine with something like yours, you did not meet a kind end.” His last words are quiet, solemn; his eyes above me are pensive under the tilt of his lashes, as if he’s looking back into a different time, a different life.

My mouth parts yet I hold back the words. I wonder if I should tell him about my dreams, how I’ve died a thousand times in the same way: a disjointed spearhead twisting into the soft, sickening warmth of my stomach — the only memory of my killer the rough and dust-cracked hands wringing the wood shaft just above my swimming vision. It sounds ludicrous, even more so that the pain is so piercing and vivid that at my worst I wake at night gasping, bent over double at the seam of my stomach. 

“Do you have any birthmarks?” I say instead. I know he’s mentioned having strange dreams a couple of times, but nothing involving being ruthlessly murdered, having your guts twisted out of you as you weep in the dirt.

“My back,” he says after a moment, a slight smile curving his lips as if remembering a secret. “It’s just like a thin line, somewhere in the middle, just below my shoulder blades — it makes me think it was from something quite sharp and fine, a knife or an arrowhead perhaps.”

“I’ve never heard of someone having a birthmark that’s in the shape of a line.”

“Exactly,” he says, animated just as he had been a while back talking about reincarnation. “I always thought when I was a kid that it had to mean _something_. So I went asking around until my grandmother told me it was how I died.”

It’s easy to find an adoration for this innocent faith of his, the wonder he possesses akin to a child, where nothing in the world is too illogical or defiant of nature to be true. The rational side of me has always warred with the bone-deep feeling within that there must be more to the world than meets the eye, and every once in a while I let my heart drift into that feeling, just for a bit. The way he speaks of it all makes me want to believe in past lives and the specific significance of birthmarks as solidly as the sky is blue, and with my head in his lap and his fingers caught in my hair and on my skin and his lovely eyes gazing down at me with something like a look of marvel I do believe in it all, I really do. 

“We died then so we could find each other now,” I say, and in my heart it feels as true as any scientific law, as logical as any mathematical equation. His smile grows wider, brighter; as if I’ve finally gotten it, the thing he was trying to get me to understand all along.

“You are half of my soul,” he says, bending over to press his nose to mine, his lips then ghosting over that pleasant place between my brows before he leans back against the bench once more, leaving me chilled from the moment.

Those words haunt me for the rest of the day, so much so that I find it hard to speak. It feels like I’ve thought them so many times, but hearing them aloud is jarring — like having my head get dunked under arctic water, the world suddenly electrified with every acute feeling. They ring in my head, the fragments of a thought, a memory, a dream — trapped and released from the recesses of my mind. I fall asleep that night to his voice spilling onto my pillow through the phone pressed to my ear, but all I hear in my head are those words, reverberating in my heart as if they were my own:

_Half of my soul._

_Half of my soul._

_He is half of my soul._


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello hello well i think that was a personal record of the time between posting back-to-back chapters. also i forgot to tell you for those who were interested i did end up posting my icarus story (it is quite short though, but honestly i'm hoping to eventually one day expand on it??). anyway for those still here and continuing to honestly help me carry on with this all ilysm and hope you guys have or had a lovely new year depending on when you guys are reading this <3

He would push me up against shadowed walls at the parties, my hands crushing his hair in my fingers like sweet rose petals, the neon streaks of light playing through my fluttering lashes. We’d get four, five, six seven eight nine drinks in deep, and go lay side by side in the dewy, night-kissed grass, laughing and rolling on top of each other, getting tangled in leaves and limbs. I think he loved it when it would leave me wrecked the next day; I’d stay with him the night, stumbling through the warm darkness of his apartment and then tangling in his ivory sheets until mid-afternoon. We’d talk, talk, talk, running our mouths numb as the sunlight chased across his little room, setting his eyes aglow with gold when he’d lay his head on the covers under its bathe. I crave the depth, the familiarity of that gaze — cutting centuries deep, transcending every life we’ve run through together. I would imagine how in every incarnation his eyes might have changed from spring green to oceanic blue to the copper brown of an intricate blade glinting in the sun yet the soul encapsulated inside would stay the same, would open to my touch like a bloom to the sunlight. I fumble for it now, his bone-familiar attention that feels like coming home. 

“Hey Oli,” I say, my voice sleepy, muffled a bit by the sheets. “How rich are you?” 

It might be a bit of a brusque question, but not to him. It’s been on my mind for a time, from the whispers I’ve heard and the slippery way he addresses money, and now the lingering deliriousness from the night before makes the question spill from my thoughts before crossing my better judgement. 

He rolls over onto his side, his lashes just grazing his cheekbones as he looks down at me. I can see how he’s just wading out of sleep, but the affection is still there, melting from the hazel of his eyes and onto me. 

“Mmmm heard enough of the rumors have you now?” He says, his voice still fuzzy. 

“You don’t have to tell me.” My mind clicks into some breath of clarity, and I realize how pushy I must sound — the last thing I need is for him to think that I’m only after his fortune, but I have a sense he wouldn’t care to sketch me with such cruelty, not after Allura. “I don’t care if you’re richer than god or penniless as a peasant,” I mumble, a graceless attempt at a smooth-over. 

He laughs, soft and lovely, no trace of hurt among the pure amusement. “It’s my dad that’s richer than god,” he says, thoughtfully. “Not all of the benefits extend to me, though.”

“So that’s why you ride a bus to the university instead of a BMW?” I say, teasingly, playing with a stray curl of his hair in my fingers. I breathe easier with hearing the light turn of his words, the frivolity with which he speaks. 

“My father would buy me ten BMWs if I asked for it,” he says, catching my hand in his and trapping it against his mouth. I feel the trace of his next words on my skin. “But my mother wants me to suffer a little, and in all honesty it would be just another vanity to make me stand out all the more.”

“As if you don’t stand out enough already,” I say, feeling the familiar burn of a smile consume my lips.

“Exactly. If I had the M6 beamer to ride around town on they wouldn’t know what to do with me here. I’d simply be worth more than the whole school.”

We both laugh at the thought, on the same note — we both know that he already is worth the whole school and something more, for there was no one prior close to his caliber and there will be no one after to match it, no matter how high he has elevated ASU’s track program. You’d have to be blind not to notice his face on the banners, the posters, printed on the front of the newspaper — he’s become a monumental event in the university’s history, he’s made ASU’s athletics worth paying attention to. 

“I get a little bit of an allowance in the summer, though. You should come with me this summer; we’ll go to Europe, to my dad’s yacht in Monaco. If we get bored we can fly to Rio and visit my _vovó_ , my grandmother. I know she will love you.” 

_Yacht, Monaco, Rio_. Those words taste sweet as exotic candies to me when I silently roll them over on my tongue, seeming too far and unattainable in my life as if he’s just said _Spaceship, Jupiter, Saturn_ instead. A little allowance will get him a whole summer of being carelessly abroad, a little allowance might get me a couple of books I’ve been lusting for at the bookstore, an iced coffee on top of that if I scrape together the right amount of change. 

“That would be really nice,” I say. I think he hears the tinge of melancholy in my voice, even though I really didn’t mean for my thoughts to seep into my words. He rolls closer to me and presses his nose against mine.

“We don’t have to go anywhere at all, if you want. I’d gladly stay in this room all of summer if it meant being here with you, like this.” His words come against my mouth now, sweet and low. 

It’s terrifying, how he’s able to voice these things with such easy, genuine confidence and mean it. If I asked him to hang out with me at some crummy motel at the side of the highway, I know he’d be excited to do it as much as wake up to the view of the Eiffel tower out of the balcony in a Parisian suite. 

It’s terrifying how deep down inside of me I would be willing to do the same with him, to follow him to the ends of the world if I had to, as long as he’d be by my side. I don’t know how to bring these feelings into words without shattering me in their power, in their implication. He doesn’t need to hear them to know they’re there, though — he knows me well enough to see it in my eyes, to feel it in the purposeful press of my mouth against his. 

“I’d die to see Rio with you,” I say against him, the words caught in the warm crevice between our lips. I feel his smile alight, spreading like an all-consuming wildfire from him to me as he draws me down on top of him, just us and the giddying promise of the future effervescent on our minds. 

—

Thanksgiving break’s come and gone, blissfully spent with Oli and his roommates and those on his team who hadn’t gone back home. My dad called, more as a choked courtesy than anything, to tell me he’d planned to go up to New Hampshire up to my aunt’s — but it was much less of an invitation and more to tell me the house would be locked should I have decided to head back home to dreadfully cold Connecticut. 

Oli, likewise, received a call from his father as well, who I could hear as I laid beside him with my face crushed into a pillow practically begging his son to come down to Southern California for a few days. Oli had looked down at me and brushed a stray lock of hair from my temple, his fingers then catching there to keep mindlessly playing at the curls. “I can’t,” he’d said, that secretive little smile on his lips, “I’ve got some things going on here.”

So we’d roamed through the emptier town with some of his friends and almost burnt a whole turkey and gotten into a slimy fight with mashed potatoes, and the best thing of it all was that I had temporarily moved into one half of his bed as he’d have it no other way. Even when his practices had resumed just before the end of the break I still stayed with him, wandering through the quiet burgundy-colored landscape of the vacant university while he was at the gym and then drifting back to watch him whenever he was on the track. Sometimes I’d bring a book to read and whenever I would look up from a page in that very moment he would look over from across the way as if preternaturally drawn by my attention, a flame caught in a draft. He would give me that smile where even the distance didn’t stop me from knowing how the soft corners of his lovely mouth would crinkle slightly in his joy, how his eyes would catch light from a radiance within with which the sun couldn’t even compete. I could watch him for hours, trying and failing to read the story gone stale in my lap, only pretending to find interest in the book so that we could keep playing at catching each other’s gazes across the way.

The bliss of that time had however worn down my guard, the surrounding circumstances and consequences of what we had going between us slipping my mind by the time the world was thrown back into the hectic buzz of classes and the return of everyone. 

It was the first week following the break and I was walking between two of my classes, and I should have known better than to trust the peace within the empty hall — and then she had pounced on me, those lethal acrylics digging through the thread of my sweater as she drags me now into an empty office space, a viper come to digest its prey in its den. 

“Forgotten about me, have you?” Allura says, her words followed by the wrathful boom of the door slamming shut behind us with the kick of her heel, the sound like a crack of thunder after the decree of a deity. 

I try to speak but she’s paralyzing — pushing me up against the wall with her incisor-like fingers clawing into my fragile collarbones, that inexplicable venom saturating her aura striking me dazed and helpless under her grip. Before I think to try speaking again she leans into me, crushing her mouth into mine, violently and catastrophically as a glacier cleaves the metal hull of a ship. I draw in a sharp hiss against my will as she bites my lip, hard, the unpleasant tang of warm iron coloring my mouth. 

Just as quickly as she crashed into me she withdraws, wiping her mouth distastefully on a frilly white sleeve, her glacial eyes roiling with the clear desire to spit in my face.

“You don’t kiss like a boy,” she says, her voice dry yet wrathful. “Maybe that’s the appeal.”

Her words catch me off-guard, and I can feel myself trying to stumble backwards but my back is already pressed against the wall. This close her perfume is nauseating, my throat choking on its sugar every time I try to draw in a breath. It’s the second time I’m in such a position with her, but now I’m feeling much less confident that I might make it out in one piece.

Her head is cocked as she surveys me, awaiting a reply. “It’s not all about that,” I finally choke out.

She laughs that high, infuriating, tinkling laugh that seems so incongruous with the dark rot that dwells within her. She drags two of her nails down the side of my cheek, predator playing with prey, and I close my eyes awaiting the weeping warmth of the cuts that never come. 

“You’d be surprised,” Allura says, thoughtfully, dragging her fingers up and down the side of my face, setting every nerve within me on fire. “I’m just trying to see what’s so fucking good about you, is all.”

“Please — just leave me — leave us — the fuck alone.” I don’t say it with as much force as I intend to, but still the words come cutting out of my mouth. I feel her drop her fingers and hear the click of her boots as she steps back, opening my eyes to find her leaning against a nearby desk, her gaze intent and chilling as a cat’s. 

“You know, you’re hurting him more than you’re doing him good,” she says, not taking her eyes off of mine. She taps her nails absently on the sides of her folded arms, as if stifling the urge to come finish clawing my eyes out. “You saw what happens when everyone knows. This is just college, though. Imagine the whole world, when they all find out he’s not putting his mouth where he should be. They’ll destroy him.”

I feel my cheeks ignite, but I fight the urge to melt into a defenseless mess — instead I focus on knife’s edge of the fury I feel for her, on the feeling in my chest that keeps me grounded knowing there’s someone now worth fighting for who would do the same for me. 

“Don’t you tell me about hurting him — you’re the one who started all that shit here,” I hiss, straightening up off of the wall and taking a step forward towards her.

“I’m not the one that started it. I just didn’t do anything to _stop it_.” She perches on the shabby desk now as smugly as a queen on her throne, and it takes all of my self restraint not to shake her. What is she so smug about? For playing with the power to ruin someone?

“Why then? Tell me — why as you say you are so worried about him getting hurt, you continue to do jus that? To prove a point, to me, to him? It’s a sick thing to do, Allura.” It makes me taste bile, just thinking about it. 

“He will come back one day, maybe not to me, but to someone else, when he realizes —”

I try to cut her off, to drown out the absurdity, but she raises her voice over me —

“— when he realizes, that in the end if the both of you are not torn apart by everyone else, then you will run each other into ruins — perhaps him even worse than you. I want you to live consciously knowing that.”

“No, Allura. You want me to live consciously knowing that I screwed up your own plans,” I say, my voice steady despite every word feeling like it will shatter on my tongue.

Her eyes flash with something quick and cutting, similar to when I’d accidentally tripped on her gaze from when I’d seen her a couple of weeks ago across the courtyard, her mouth turned to the ear of a helpless blonde she’d snagged. She says nothing, though, and before she’s able to come up with a wounding retort I start towards the door. I’m already too late, though, my hand freezing on the door handle as the damning words slither coolly from out behind of me. 

“If you really love him, you will let him go.”


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ahhhhhh so my classes began again and the practices for my team resumed so it's going to be fun to try find time to write but i'll just have to try bend time to my own will and it should be ok haha but pls know if i disappear it's not because i stopped on this story it's because life has gotten me into its clutches ... but i promise i won't stop writing ok i'm here to see my boys through on this story <3   
> here's a chapter with some stuff going on, i'll leave you with this for now :)

He’s smiling like a toddler with a secret, humming to himself, his eyes alighting on something not in his direct plane of vision.

It takes me a while to notice this, longer than it should’ve — I’m still digesting the encounter with Allura, her words even more so rattling as they chase me in my dreams. They fall from the pretty rosebud-pink lips of a dark-haired girl, her ebony eyes penetrating me even into the waking world. I sometimes wake with the sharp imprint of her face haunting my mind, familiar and chilling until it’s gone without leaving a trace of a clear memory, shaken with the cobwebs of my dreams. 

I spend the week swimming in and out of my thoughts, the present sometimes an echo of sound coming from above the surface. I find a moment of lucidity when I am with Oli one afternoon, sitting on his living room sofa and running a highlighter through my biology textbook. I look up from my reading to where he’s sprawled on the carpet right below me, texting someone with his anatomy homework abandoned on the ground, that slight tilt to his lips again as if he’s thinking of something quite pleasant or exciting. My eyes betray me and catch his screen as he briefly tilts it my way, but the only thing I can comprehend in those few seconds are that the words are not in English. 

“Hey,” I say softly, shutting my textbook with the finality of knowing that studying later will likely be a futile effort. “What are you up to?”

He looks up at me, and there’s a pleased surprise on his face, as if he’s been waiting for me to ask this for some time, but not at this very moment. He picks himself off of the floor in one graceful motion with the natural ease akin to a bird taking flight or a cat leaping up; I could never tire of watching him do these mundane little movements that somehow excel everyone’s else’s. 

I move my outstretched legs as he sits down on the sofa beside me, crossing his legs neatly underneath him and propping up his chin on his hands like a little boy come to share a story with me. His lack of words kindles the anxiety in the pit of my stomach, but the frivolous light playing in his eyes gives me a feather of ease to hold onto. 

“There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you,” he finally says. He’s trying to sound nonchalant but my ears have learned the peaks and valleys of his voice too well to sense the shade of excitement — and there’s the hint of a bright smile flirting at his lips, like the sun teases at the horizon in the dark moments before it rises. 

“Oh?” I say, at a loss for anything better. 

“I got an offer. From another school.”

Oh, God. I shouldn’t feel the soured twist in my gut at those words, but I do — it’s even more worse, even more sickening that he now sounds genuinely elated, his voice shivering with anticipation. My lips strain against the smile I force, my face trying to war with the faux emotion. 

“Which one?” I say as lightly as I would ask which brand of cereal to get him at the store. My heart beats against the cage of my chest like an entrapped bird, my throat tightening and burning with something bitter. My oversensitive body strains to tip me into premature despair, but I push it down, down, down, focusing my eyes on tracing those glimmering edges of his face, alight with the glittering future. _His_ glittering future. 

He rubs his hands together, as if rallying himself. “Columbia,” he says at last, barely suppressing his grin.

I blink, my mind temporarily freezing at the name. “Oh ... wow. Okay. That’s ... amazing.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. It’s really cool.” 

“So ... are you going to go?” Every word on my tongue I try to keep light and ephemeral as the brush of a butterfly’s wing, but my mind is glass shivering with the desire to shatter. It’s selfish, so selfish of me to even quietly react to this like some kind of impeding doom, as if he’ll be carried off to some war or his life will soon expire. Did I really think I’d get to keep him to myself forever?

He looks at me, and there are just the smallest creases of tension at the corners of his mouth, as if he can sense that bitter undercurrent running through my mind. I may know his moods like the weather but he knows my emotions by now like the back of his own hand. 

“Does your mother know?” I ask quietly, needing to get it out, to say something, even though I think I know the answer from the texts in Portuguese I’d seen clouding his phone. I try to escape his thoughtful, open gaze set on me, trying to gauge my reaction — the question briefly shifts his attention, but still I tilt my face down with the distraction of working at a loose thread in the couch

“Yeah, she wants me to go. She’s the one that manages those things and all, deciding on the right program for me and everything.” 

Of course. I could never say it to his face, but she has him bound like a marionette — he’s loosened the strings to her hands but not severed them, and now he must still carry on in her play. 

“But do you want to go?” It’s hard, to keep my voice steady. Each word is scalding, a heavy stone sliding down my throat — yet I sound light enough that he doesn’t suspect. 

He wrings his hands, but there is a ghost of a private smile on his lips.

“I think I do. It’s an illustrious program and all. And it’s obviously an Ivy, which counts for something.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty far up there,” I say a little faintly. 

He takes my hand messing at the thread into his and weaves our fingers together, raising our linked hands so that he lays the back of mine against the dreamy warmth of his cheek. “Come with me,” he sighs, and I feel the shape of those three little words against the back of my hand. 

“To ... Columbia?” I say quizzically. Anywhere, anywhere but one of those wildly prestigious, horrifyingly expensive schools, I could follow him to. Just not there, not in this life. 

“Mmm.”

“Oli, I don’t know if I can.”

“It’s better than this school academically. They’re like one of the top programs in the nation, or something.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I know. That’s why I don’t know if I’ll get in.” With anyone else I might’ve rolled my eyes, but I know he’s genuine about everything he says — he just wants the best for me, even though it sounds like he’s just trying to convince himself. 

“You’ll get in.”

“Oli,” I begin, pulling away. “I’m absolutely nobody with an absolutely average GPA with absolutely no extracurriculars or achievements that would warrant me to get into one of the most competitive school in the nation.” He opens his mouth to protest, but I plow on. “Besides, with this close to the next semester, I doubt they’ll be taking transfers on such a short notice. Academics is definitely not as flexible as athletics, Oli.”

“Adrian. You’re not just nobody. You’re somebody’s nobody. You’re my nobody.” His every word is measured, solid; if I’d wanted to try to interrupt, to disagree, I’d just hit a wall. 

“And?” I say. I want to tell him it’s hopeless, to just let me go and save the pointless fight — but he’s in that stubborn mood of his, a flame in his eyes to challenge the heavens. It’s better to let him say what he has to say. 

“I get to set the terms. They want me so fucking much that I could probably get them to accept half of ASU just so that I can run for them.”

“So you haven’t signed with them yet?”

“No. They don’t even know if I will.”

A stroke of light, a candle set aflame in the pressing dark. I should have known, that he’d sooner choose to drown than swim to shore without me. 

“Wow, that’s some power you have,” I say, trying to sound light, but I think I might sound more like I’m going to soon pass out. The amount of times I’ve been emotionally tested in these past few months has left me running on burnt nerves. 

“I can get you in.” He insists. “It’s not an issue. If they say no for whatever reason, I’ll just tell them to fuck off then.” 

I shake my head. “Oli, even if I get accepted, do you know how much money that is? I — I can’t pull that sum, not in this life.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“Oli —” 

“I’ll. Take. Care. Of. It.” He says firmly, swiftly taking my face in his hands so it makes it hard to protest. “Now, that you are thoroughly convinced on your acceptance and complete funding at Columbia University, can you tell me if you will actually go or not.”

“Oli, I swear —” I mumble through the confines of his hands pressed against my cheeks, but he catches my words before I can even think to finish. 

“Ah, ah, ah! Everything will be taken care of, I promise. It’s just you now, because your desire to go is the only thing that I can’t include in the terms and conditions.” He looks at me, steady and determined, trusting the answer formulating on my tongue to be the right one, as if I could bring myself to say anything else than that to him.

I gently take his hands holding my cheeks into mine and lower them, threading our fingers together. His eyes don’t waver from mine, and I find my strength in their bright, electrifying amber — a color born of a dream. I don’t hesitate. 

“I’ll go with you to Columbia,” I say firmly.

And tomorrow there will be a new dawn on the horizon. 

— 

“I’m — I’m thinking about transferring.”

“You don’t like it there? At ASU? I was under the impression that you were having a good time.”

I rub my eyes under my glasses and lean my forehead against the plaster column. The phone is icy against my ear in the chilly afternoon, the uneven surface of the wall is uncomfortable against my skull — yet the most unpleasant thing of this all is navigating the treacherous waters of this conversation.

“I just don’t know anymore. If this is where I want to be.”

I hear his long, thin exhalation on the other end of the line. I can picture him now, rubbing his eyes in the same way I do as he tries to figure out what the hell is wrong with his son.

“Have you met a girl, Adrian?” 

The question takes me by surprise — I laugh breathily before I can catch myself, but I don’t think my dad shares my amusement.

“Listen to me, Adrian. You can’t go chasing someone across the country just because you want to sleep with them.” His voice steels into his zero-bullshit-tolerance tone, but I keep from letting the sharpened edges of his words cut me — I distract myself by tracing shapeless patterns on the plaster with my finger. 

“It’s nothing like that, dad.” It’s exactly like that, except so much worse if he finds out who exactly I’m sleeping with. 

“Then what? Where were you thinking about transferring to anyways?”

I name the Ivy. I catch his soft swear at the other end, even though I know he holds the phone away as he usually does for his profanities. 

“ _Jesus fuck_ , Adrian. Do you know how much money that is? Have you even been accepted?” Ever the voice of my conscience.

“I’m working on it,” I say. I meant for it to sound assuring, but I hear how faintly my voice drips from my mouth as it echos down the line.

“I don’t know then, Adrian. Do what you want. Get accepted and find the aid. Don’t go asking for my help, though, because I’ve gotten you this far, yet I feel like you’re a little short on the gratitude here.”

“I won’t,” I promise, but my head feels dizzy, thinking of the sum, the loans, of whether I’ll even be admitted despite everything that Oli has promised. He may think himself a god capable of getting others to do as he pleases, and even though I want to be utterly pious to him, there are just some ways in which the world refuses to bend. 

“You call me if you end up somehow transferring. Otherwise I don’t want to hear a word of this bullshit ever again.” 

Sometimes I wish the world had made my father with a little more grace and affection.

“Alright, I will.” 

He’s already hung up by the time the last word leaves my mouth. 

I shove my phone in my coat pocket and turn to lean my side against the column, the single phone call leaving me feeling wrung out, every nerve drained dry. Just across the way, beyond the metallic weave of the fence, the glint of a honey-colored head out on the track catches the draining light, naturally drawing my eyes. 

The truth is I’d follow that head to the ends of the world, to another life, if I had to. No amount of stiff phone calls or outrageously high tuitions could stop that. If he’s going to Columbia, somehow I’m going to get there with him.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow, a chapter of some actual length! i was going to break it up but i've settled on the "go big or go home" mentality.  
> anyway, not sure why i'm emotional over this when it's like my own doing but my boys are finally moving to new york together. i'm so proud of them.   
> on an unrelated note i hope you guys are having a nice and stress-free life whether you're in or out of school, and i'm sending you a lot of good vibes and energy to write/read to get you through the beginning of the semester or this month or whatever!!

“So you got into Columbia?” 

Levi and I both stare at the acceptance letter like some sort of cryptic prophecy sent from the heavens, the paper half-unfolded on my desk. My name and the words _you have been selected for admission to Columbia University_ are just visible in fine print under the emblem, the black ink authentic and final. Another minute stretches by and I take the letter gingerly by the corners to fold it up again, terrified that it’s going to disintegrate in my fingers. 

“It appears to be so,” I say tentatively, not quite ready to believe it myself.

I could say I had no doubt in Oli to pull it off, with him only asking for my rather average transcript in the process — yet it was difficult to shake the feeling that this was all some sort of a figment of a dream, that I might blink my eyes open in the middle of a lecture to find that I was living in a fabrication of my mind. Yet the letter still whispers against the table as I set it down by my books, the paper starchy and solid as life underneath my fingertips. Levi’s face hovering close by is etched with a mix of impressiveness and mild annoyance at the same time, the expression wrought with a peculiarity that could only be exclusive to the waking world. 

“I thought you flunked out of bio,” Levi says, his glasses flashing up at me.

“I was able to come in for a retake,” I reply, smiling dryly.

“It must be nice to be liked by many.”

“And loved by some,” I say quietly, shuffling some papers around on my desk to keep myself senselessly occupied. It’s crazy to think that in a week, after finals are over, I’ll be gone. Uprooted from this life and carried on to the next, back to the east coast where memories walk the streets in the crush of the pedestrians. New York, my mother’s city — the two exist in conjunction in my mind, and when one ceased to be the other was locked deep within a chamber of my heart. I could never tell Oli that a reason Columbia rubbed me wrong when the name first spilled from his lips was because I knew I would be haunted in that city, yet he knows certain ghosts of the past and dreams cling to me as they do to him. He’s electrified at the thought of leaving this place because his own shadows still breathe hot on his heels here.

Yet, _Columbia_. Be it as it may a year ago I would have swooned at the prospect of being admitted; I was even too shaken to think of applying, to begin tallying up that six-figure debt to chase me to the edge of my life. But now the stars have aligned in such a way that I’ve been snuck there under the wing of the only person that has touched my soul in an indomitable way. 

Still, there is this feeling within me, one that I almost let slip to Levi as he goes back to his desk to sit unstaring at a slew of chemistry problems, his face still etched in private disbelief — that the prospect of Columbia is a blackhole that Oli and I are helplessly drawn towards by the unconquerable tides of gravity, an ill omen churning on the horizon. Dreams of war have come to chase me again at night, even when I lie in that heavenly cage of his arms. I wake with an inexplicable panic of a man knowing he has set off on a journey from which he will never come back, the anxiety clawing at my chest in the early mornings until the sun dispels the shadows clinging to the mind, until he kisses me raw and the feelings of reality overwhelm those of figment. 

My tongue itches to tell Levi all of this, but in my mind I already see his brows drawing together, asking where I’ve misplaced my sanity. Instead I turn around towards his desk and say, “Will you visit me in New York?”

His pencil hovers frozen a hairsbreadth from the paper on his desk, as it does when I know he’s rolling over a problem in his head. This time I know it’s not related to chemistry. I hear the click of his pencil as he methodically sets it down parallel to the paper before he twists to face me. 

“It’s your new life, Adrian. Why do you need me there?” 

There it is — the bite of bitterness, the hollow ring to his voice. Ever since I told Levi a couple of weeks ago about Oli’s proposition, we hadn’t exchanged a word on it until today. Still we were two planets orbiting the blinding truth of the sun, and while I knew it was not cruelty but rather the unavoidable resentment born of jealousy that clouded his eyes, there was the nausea of wrongness twisted within me. He deserved it more than I ever did.

I say the first words that clatter to my mind, either right or wrong with no instinct to tell me which it is. 

“Because you’re my friend. One of my only ones here, really.” It sounds dumb, but it’s true — and I desperately want to leave here on good terms with him, especially considering that. His expression is cloudy as he ponders on this, and for a moment my heart drips with genuine fear that he’ll find some way to invalidate this. 

Instead, he does something unexpected — he smiles, the movement somewhat stiff on his thin lips. “Well, then. As your only friend, albeit one that is a better one to you then you are to me, how about I come to visit you as long as you last a whole year there?” 

There’s an edge to his mouth, wry yet humorous; I nearly sigh in relief at his thawing reproach. 

I put a hand to my chest in mock affront and try to bite down the beginning of a ridiculous smile. “So you think my clearly outstanding academic abilities will prove futile in an Ivy?”

“Just don’t lose sight of what is important.”

His words are supposed to sound light, but they weigh like stones on my chest. 

“And what is that supposed to be?” 

I feel like I’m mouthing the words rather than saying them, the question directed inwards rather than out. Levi seems to hear me though, and he lists his head curiously, seeming to chew on my answer. There’s a tinge of amusement in his cool eyes as he regards me.

“You tell me in a year,” he says.

The whole conversation leaves me hungover for the rest of the day.

— 

Everything is packed — five months of my life here jammed into two tattered suitcases. 

I spent the last two days of my time at ASU living in Oli’s apartment, since Levi had left for the winter break. There was something intolerably depressing about the thought of sitting in a stripped-bare dorm room to watch the corners start to collect dust. 

So I lived with Oli, and we spent nearly every moment together gorging on takeout or aimlessly wandering the small university town in parting or just tracing each other’s faces in the dark, as if we weren’t leaving together. I still couldn’t bring myself to call my father to tell him that I _had_ somehow pulled this all off, mostly out of fear that it would dispel the magic of the miracle, that shortly after the phone call I’d find everything to come crashing down around me. This moment felt like spotting a rare, beautiful animal out in the wild, and the more attention you brought to it, the likelier it felt compelled to flee. I spent my two nights sporadically turning my phone on in the dark, my fingers hovering over the long-dated messages to my dad and then getting distracted by how the soft electric light would illuminate the planes of Oli’s face, his lashes fluttering slightly against the illumination like a butterfly’s wings when they are brushed by the wind. I could lose a life of sleep to watching the ethereal softness of his face at night when he’s lost deep in his dreams, to feeling the simple electrifying joy of his hand threaded through mine in the sheets. 

We’re standing outside now in the biting December mid-morning, the sky above a glacial azure while the pale sun weeps warmth on our skin. West to east coast winter is going to be a very bitter and very cold transition, and I’m already shivering at thinking how Oli intends to fend off the cold by only layering with the two light jackets that he has. I think of how his honey skin is going to miss the kiss of the sun for months, how his hair will lose that summer luster. 

A shiny Cadillac rolls up to the curb we’re lounging on with our suitcases, our legs stretched out carelessly into the street where we both have to draw them back suddenly to avoid getting caught by the tires. I have to shield my eyes from the glare of the car in the sharp sunlight as I stand up sheepishly from the ground.

A tinted window rolls down on the passenger side, from which peers out the face of a man. It takes a second to see that he’s cultivated in the way that only the very affluent can be — sleek haircut; elegantly-cut sunglasses; a Rolex the price of my education on a wrist casually hanging out of the window. He smiles us a well-moneyed smile as my father would say, all easy charm and overwhelmingly white teeth.

He ducks out of the car and sweeps his sunglasses onto his head in one seamless motion, and only then I can see the resemblance in the crinkle of the eyes, the jovially boyish cheeks giving the brief illusion of youth even on his aged face. He steps forward to clasp a hand amiably on his sons shoulder, and to my surprise he towers half a head taller than Oli despite his heavier set. Oli tilts his head up to his father with an echoing smile, one perhaps a few notches less ostentatious and more authentic in that pure and blameless way of his. 

“My dear boy, it’s been a while,” Oli’s father says, giving his son’s shoulder an affectionate shake — his voice very much matches his flamboyant air, booming and genial in the way of someone only chronically delighted could be. Somehow I’m surprised that Oli’s lighter frame doesn’t balk under his father’s large and heavily-Rolexed hand. 

“It’s good to see you too, dad,” he says, his voice seeming many shades calmer beside his father’s. He seems to be squinting up at him slightly, and I realize that this must be from the combined glare of the sleek automobile and the equally-shimmering man before him. 

Oli’s father now turns to me, and despite wishing our interaction would be kept to a minimum, I find something electrified within me at the suddenly bright wash of his attention, like a flower opening to a cascade of sunlight. I see from where Oli gets his natural aptitude to ruthlessly magnetize absolutely everyone and anyone to his effervescent presence. 

His father does the same affectionate man-to-man shoulder-clasp to me as to his son, his palm almost encompassing the entirety of my shoulder.

“And you must be the blessedly smart Adrian! I owe you my infinite gratitude for helping my boy out, but I hope the set-up with Columbia will do for now.”

All of my own endless gratitude bubbles up on my tongue, and I’m already tripping over the words in my humbled clumsiness. “It’s so very nice of you to do this for me Mr. —” He cuts me off with a tight squeeze on my shoulder, which I fear for a moment might fracture my collarbone.

“Please, my boy, I don’t want to hear a word of worry about it. And call me Leo — might as well since you’re as good as one of my own now.” 

I glance towards Oli and he gives me a shrug with one of his coy smiles as if to say, _well, this is my dad_. I turn back to Leo and try to give him one of my most radiant, winning smiles, which really probably looks more like a pained grimace. Leo seems to take it as it is and gives me an even more overwhelming one in return.

He then turns to the car and does a brisk beckoning motion, to which in an instant the driver, a very trim-looking man, springs out of the car and goes to lug our pile of belongings into the trunk. I almost jump to help but check myself as Oli catches my eye and gives a slight nod towards the chauffeur. 

“Now, boys — the jet’s been a little iffy so I hope you don’t mind I booked you both first class to JFK; it should be a direct flight so hopefully it’s not too intolerable.” Leo turns to us and begins to gently herd us to the car, as if he fears we intend to stay at the news. I look over at Oli again with raised brows at the word jet — even though I knew his father owned one from the multiple allusions to it, it’s still a little overwhelming for my mind to accept it as a confirmed fact. Oli looks like he’s just about to laugh at my continuously dumb-struck expressions, but he smooths his face into collected pleasantness once his father turns back to him. 

“Oh, it should be completely fine. I’ll likely sleep through the whole flight anyways since I didn’t get much of it last night,” he says in awaited reply to his father, just as the chauffeur rounds to our side to open the door for us. I find great interest in the tree across the street as the flame of a blush creeps up my cheeks.

I slip inside right after Oli, the door shutting behind me in a satisfying clap. My hands are instantly gratified by the smooth leather of the seats, my nose blessed at the cool scent of perpetually-new car. I’ve never seen such a nice or dustless interior of a vehicle, every stitch in the leather classily wrought; only my uncle’s ancient Lambo could begin to compare, yet the sticky seats in it were long-smoked by age, the inside tainted with the incense of grease and oil and cheap gasoline. 

By the time I shake my wonderment, we’re zipping by on the highway. I crane my head back to catch a farewell glimpse at Aegean State, but all that’s left to see of it is the speck of the highway exit sign receding into the distance. There’s a brief wave of wistfulness that rolls through me at my failure to properly part with my home of the last few months. There’s the feeling of living in a quaint and calm university town that I know I’ll miss, especially once I’m back in the mind-fogging buzz of the city. 

“It was a good school,” Oli says as he catches me looking, his voice low enough for only me to hear. 

“In its own way. We’re off to something bigger now,” I reply, sinking back into my unbearably comfortable seat. I think I’m just trying to convince my own self. 

“You’re the one that made it worth it.”

I spend the rest of the ride looking out of the window, staring at my reddened reflection in the glass and not knowing what I could ever say to that, when really it goes both ways. 

—

Once we arrive to the airport, there’s the flurry of hectic activity that is incited regardless of how early you are to your flight. As we’re pulling up to the curb of the departure terminal, I see the sidewalk dotted with other students from ASU on their way to return home for the break, visible especially by their bulky luggages, university hoodies, and frazzled expressions. The thought of how many will recognize us, specifically the tantalizing combination of Oli and this luxury vehicle, leaves me reluctant to hop straight out of the car as Oli does right when it stops by the entrance. He’s clad in the easily-recognizable white-and-turquoise colors of ASU’s athletics, wearing the _ASU Men’s Swimming_ jacket that at this point he must have stolen from his roommate. He doesn’t seem to care that he’s representing the completely wrong sport, strutting assuredly outside like he’s the gold-medalist for swimming. 

I draw in a final steadying breath of the pleasantly-perfumed interior, and I’m just about to step out to face the beginning this strange journey when Oli’s father suddenly turns to face me from the front seat.

“A quick word, m’boy, if you wouldn’t mind,” he says, his tone still very zestful but a few notches quieter than before in the semi-private space. I glance out the window to see Oli animatedly talking already to someone who must be a student from ASU, likely from soccer based on the duffel bag. The chauffeur tries to balance all of our luggage on a cart which Oli supports with one hand to give an air of purpose as he gracefully gestures in the air with his other. I sink back in my seat and give my attention to his father.

“Of course,” I say, nodding in what I hope is a reassuring matter. Leo smiles as if I’ve agreed to give him a million-dollar check. 

“When I said I’m grateful to you for helping my son out, I meant it. Poor Oliver’s always been a little short in the attention department, but I’m sure he must get that from me,” he begins saying, giving a hearty laugh as he flutters a hand around his head in emphasis of his son’s one deficit. “So when he’d told me he got his GPA up because one kind boy was helping him, I thought to myself, ‘Hallelujah! Finally he’s got some good influences going in his life!’” At this he looks at me, as if I’m supposed to supply a witty response to this. I give him a timid smile, which seems to satisfy him enough to carry on.

“So, when he got this whole thing going with Columbia, I was of course excited, naturally, since I’ve always thought he’s been outshining ASU’s athletic caliber by far — but then I remembered how rigorous on the academics all the Ivy Leagues are, and needless to say it made me a little uneasy to think he’d have to cope with keeping up with the other boys with their smarts on top of everything else.”

“But he _is_ smart,” I cut in before my mind reigns in my innate reaction. I feel my face getting hot for the twentieth time this day, the only thing saving me from complete embarrassment is the low-lit interior of the car. 

“Rightly so! This is precisely what I am talking about when I say you are undoubtedly a good influence. When I talked to him about his grades and he’d said, ‘dad, if only I could bring Adrian with me,’ I’d said, ‘well of course son, why not?’ and he’d told me about your financial predicament, which is nothing to be ashamed of, my boy.” 

I wonder if I squirmed at those two words or he’d just paused to let the implication sink in. He throws a glance outside at Oli during this break, who still seems to be lost in conversation, and takes that as a cue to plow on. 

“So I’d decided the right move was to simply take care of that little issue for you, and don’t you even think to worry about it now or later! I only ask you continue to give my son your kindly assistance in his studies — I even had them coordinate it so that you two would be taking many of the same classes, which I hope you won’t mind too much. It’s the only way I see to go about this little situation of his. I must also say he’s never quite taken a liking to a person as much as you so it must be all the better to keep you together.”

I’m saved the scramble for a reply at the last remark by Oli’s sudden realization that I’m still in the car — he’s seemed to have finished talking and decided to open the door to come tug me out. 

“We better go. We still have security and everything else to get through,” he says, his voice drifting into the quiet of the car on a wave of airport cacophony from outside. I catch him rolling his eyes dramatically at the prospect of having to actually wait in line for a flight, but then right after there’s the moment I see where he realizes that he’s dropped in on a conversation between me and his dad, his brows drawing together slightly as he sees my polite expression and his father turned around partway to face me in the back. He starts to make the move to step back out, but Leo quickly supplies the graceful end to our silent compact. 

“He’s right, better not miss your flight or it’d be a dread to have to wait for the next one,” he says, dropping a quick wink at me. I nod out of a lack of anything clever to say, and I’m about to step out after Oli when I think of something.

“I hope you know that you’ve changed my life,” I say, and I mean it — the intent is reflected in the rare solidness of my words; for once I know that I’m not mumbling through the sentence. I turn to go before waiting to see his reaction, my brain too worn to continue calculating my next move for every turn in a social interaction. He steps out as well, to give Oli something of a quick half-hug, which is more of him pressing his shoulder to his son’s who seems to lightly dance away at the embrace, not in rudeness but more to avoid the sticky sentiment. 

I stand partially obscured from their flighty moment behind the stack of the luggage, and I gladly skip to leave as Oli turns in my direction to help me drag the cart inside. I fear that another minute with his father might result in me finally doing something irrevocably stupid such as weeping before him and kissing his feet in my overwhelming gratitude. I fall into a quick step beside Oli, but not without giving a parting nod, which I hope communicates the promise of my full commitment which was left unsaid. Leo flashes me one last dazzling smile, his fine-shaven cheeks dimpling much like his son’s.

Ticket counter, security, buying skittles at a news stand, the departure gate — I’m in a daze throughout the forty-five minutes it takes to go through all of is, my body going through the motions while my mind drifts separated from everything, still caught on the other side of the threshold of my old life as I’m stepping into the new one. 

I only come to when we’ve boarded the plane and we’re sitting in our outrageously comfortable first-class seats; I’m staring at Oli as he stares out the window as the plane begins to roll backwards from the gate, his outline against the sun filtering in through the oval pane and the thrum of the engines and squeal of the wheels on the concrete bringing me back to my senses in sharp clarity. 

He turns to me, smiling as if he’s realized just as well that I’ve found my footing on solid ground again. The sunlight gives his disheveled hair the illusion of a halo, and I mindlessly reach to pat the curls down.

“Skittles?” He says, catching my hand as I’m drawing my arm back, tilting the contents of the bag into my palm before I can protest. I’m not a fan of the candy, but I munch it down out of lack of any other options, tasting every flavor of the rainbow in all of its overwhelming sourness and sweetness as advertised. 

When I’m done he takes my hand into his and lays his head down in the crook between my shoulder and neck, his curls brushing ticklishly against my chin and cheek. He lifts our joint hands to his mouth and kisses my knuckles in the way that he likes and I very much love, but I don’t have time to bask in the feeling when a panic seizes my chest, overwhelming everything. I realize where we are, out in the plain sight of everyone — we tried to keep everything low-key at ASU despite everyone already knowing, to avoid the hissing that would run frigid fingers down my spine and make Oli chew on his bottom lip, a tick of his that only I knew meant that he was uncomfortable. My heart jolts back into its normal rhythm when I realize that we can drop our careful choreography around each other out in the public eye, for there is the newfound bliss of anonymity that comes with being surrounded by a sea of the indifferent faces of strangers, dully noting two boys that seem to be on very friendly terms with one another. This, more than anything, must have been the appeal to Oli to drop everything as long as I came with him to go to New York — to start on a blank page where we could write the opening lines of our story as we pleased. 

I let myself melt into this new ease that settles over my heart and soul, tilting my head so that I can put my lips against his temple to kiss the soft skin there. I close my eyes to the feeling of having found Elysium. 

He stirs slightly at my touch, and a moment later I feel his mouth move against the back of my hand as he whispers, “Are you ready?”

I lift my free hand to absently stroke the fine wisps of his hair by his forehead, using the distraction to think up my reply. 

“Always,” I breathe against the top of his head, his curls tickling my lips at the word. I feel him smile against my skin, the expression sinking into my bones and warming my soul. 

We sit like that for a bit as they go over safety and the plane rolls around on the ground for ages as they seem to always do, our breaths and heartbeats becoming synced as if we’ve truly melted into each other. I’m just about to drift off to the meditative drone of the plane before we’ve even taken off, when a thought worms its way into my mind. I try to swallow it but it sticks to my tongue, itching to be left out.

“Does he know?” I say softly against his hair. For a moment I think he’s actually fallen asleep as he’s promised, but then he slowly shifts out from under my chin, taking care to keep holding onto my hand. He takes a minute to stretch himself out in his seat from the folded position, but really I think he’s just using the time to ruminate on my question.

“No,” he says after a moment, absently gazing at our intertwined fingers resting on the armrest between us. “I don’t think he would care though, even if he did. We’re not really close enough for him to be picking up on that kind of thing.”

I drop the next most bothersome question, even though it puts a nail in my heart to even be asking it. “What about your mother, then?”

He looks up at me now, and we’re close enough that I can see every fleck of amber in the pools of his brown eyes. There’s something solemn held within them, but there’s also the flicker of a flame of another emotion in their depths that I can’t quite catch.

“Ah, that’s a bit of a different story.” His words are drawn out as he says them, and I can tell there’s much more behind them that neither of us are ready to go into. 

“We have a few hours to not have to think about it,” I say.

“Then let’s do our best to enjoy them,” he says, a touch of a smile returning to his lips.

“That shouldn’t be an issue.”

My words become steadily drowned out by the sound of the engine turbines accelerating, and in a few seconds the runway begins to blur through the window. This seems to blissfully distract Oli from everything, who nearly presses his nose to the window in his childish joy to watch the plane take off. He draws me forward with him so that I’m half-stretched out of my seat, but as always there’s no way to say no to being invited into experiencing this infectious happiness of his.

“Hey, look! That’s ASU,” he says by my nose, pressing a finger up against the glass to point out a collection of burgundy buildings shrinking rapidly far below us on the ground, or at least that’s what I think he’s pointing at. I don’t want to break his heart and say that really it could be any university or high school or random gathering of similarly-colored buildings for that matter, especially since I can already tell it’s missing ASU’s immense football stadium. We’re not even flying over the general area of the university, especially not this soon after takeoff when it took a lengthy car ride to even get to the airport. I don’t mention anything of it though and instead give a private smile to the window. 

“Thank you for the memories,” I say, brushing my own fingers against the glass, even though I know those words fall far from their intended recipient. Oli’s reply shortly after reflects off of the window in front of us, his breath warming my cheeks. 

“And on to many more.”


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy valentines day!! i guess this is my little present to you guys (even tho it's probably not my best writing ever oof)  
> i've been really loaded with studying and all and i just happened to get sick which finally gave me time to write, even though the whole being sick thing sucks even if it's just a crappy little cold .. but hopefully i'll actually have time to get out some more writing <33

Oli’s mother meets us in the arrival terminal at JFK. 

The resemblance jumps out immediately, once I see them side by side — the sunlit-brown hair, falling in neat long coils down to her elbows while the same curls crown Oli’s head but in a much more unruly incarnation. The keen tilt of the head; the olive-tinged skin; the honey-brown eyes that are infinitely warm in his face while they are unsettling in her’s, glowing slightly amber with the penetrating look that reminds me of a cat. 

She sweeps towards him once we’re near, her heeled boots clicking sharply on the glaring linoleum floor, cooing to him in the melodic notes of Portuguese. He answers in kind, and I jarringly realize it’s the first time I heard him speak his mother’s language — his words are low and mellifluous, his voice pitched sweetly, almost as if he’s singing. Her sinuous hands frame and flutter about his face, smoothing down his riotous hair from the long flight. It’s so disconcerting seeing this open affection from her, enough that I subtly glance away — especially after hearing Oli’s stories of his childhood with her, about a mother whose spirit was as tricky as the licking flames of fire: warm and comforting at times, but biting with burns when you weren’t careful.   
“ _Mamãe_ , this is Adrian,” I hear him say, and I lift my eyes just as he pulls away from her fussing. He looks brightly at me and then at her, and I can tell that he is expectant for her judgement, like a little kid presenting his messy artwork. 

Her smile is strained as she regards me, her rose-pink lips drawing upwards a little crudely, almost distastefully. “How nice,” she simply says, her words honeyed and rolling pleasantly with her slight accent, yet lacking all the warmth of when she spoke her first language with her son. 

“It’s nice to meet you,” I say reflexively, courteously. Although I’m not sure if this is entirely true. 

The displeased edge to her mouth deepens infinitesimally, as if I’ve said something truly foul. She quickly smooths it over when Oli glances back at her, but there’s still something guarded, almost predatory in her eyes as she holds her attention on me for a few more seconds. She’s so unlike his father that I almost wonder how the two ever intersected, but there’s an undeniable thrill in being regarded by her that’s difficult to encapsulate — it’s an adrenaline rush that boils through your veins; it’s nails scraping your back raw; it’s looking a tiger in the eyes and feeling something ancient and wild stare back. I desperately want her to look away but at the same time I don’t. When she finally flicks her eyes away listlessly, all of my nerves tingle with the memory of them. Oli has his head cocked curiously towards me, his eyes glowing like his mother’s, as if he can sense how shallow my breaths rattle in my chest. 

“Get all of your things; we have places to get to,” she says after a moment, jerking her nose towards the carousel just starting to carry the bags from our plane. 

Oli springs into movement without a moment of hesitation, and rarely have I ever seen him react at this speed to his coach on the track. I don’t think I have an option except to follow him. I glance back at his mother but she doesn’t even look up to see if we’ve followed her command; she’s taken her phone out and her manicured fingers are already dancing rapidly across the screen, her nails clicking coldly against the glass. There’s something of her poise that disconcertingly reminds me of Allura, except she makes the girl seem like a fearful cub in comparison to a lioness. 

It was silly of me to assume we would be getting the same lavish service as we did with Oli’s father, but I’m quick to catch on to the fact that his mother runs the show differently. She may be dressed in a Louis Vuitton trench coat and have a matching bag to complete the look, with the wreath of gemstones glittering ostensibly around her neck and her hoop earrings a rich buttery gold despite the unflattering light — but still Oli and I are charged to drag and shove our mound of bags on our own into an ordinary, city-grade taxi. 

His mother stands on the curb spilling a stream of foreign words into the phone cocked against her ear, occasionally snapping her fingers at us while barking something at Oli, who seems unfazed by it all. We hardly talk except to try to engineer a scheme on getting everything to fit. I wish I could just pull him aside to catch our breath, to have a handful of seconds to get oriented in this sudden chaos — the storm of his mother and the clench of the New York cold in my lungs, the sky beyond the concrete roof as grey as doom and the shuffle of people all around, every flavor of the world. It hits me like a blast of snow when you open the door in a blizzard that there’s no going back, only forwards — I’ve chosen this, I’ve chosen Oli. So here I am, stifling the urge to close my eyes and hope I will open them back at ASU, stumbling awake from this fever dream. 

The taxi driver chews on a smoldering cigarette as he half-heartedly aids us in trying to defy the small confines of the trunk. It doesn’t look like we’ll make it out without leaving something or someone behind until Oli magically produces a crumpled twenty while his mother’s not looking. With the encouragement, everything gets forcibly shoved into the car in a matter of seconds through a multitude of smoke-scented grunts and my own winces as I imagine everything getting crushed inside.

Now we’re rushing in the general direction of Manhattan, where Oli told me we would be first staying in a hotel for a couple of days before moving into our place by the university. Oli’s crushed against me on one side while a wall of luggage occupies the seat next to me, and despite the uncomfortable confines of the back seat, neither of us is too displeased with the situation. Oli flashed me a sly smile before he had slid into the car after me, hopelessly trapping me against his side. 

Out the window beyond the line of his profile I can just make out the shadow of the Empire State Building towering over the city, the top wreathed in the hazy swaths of the low winter clouds. I’m just about to point it out to him when the thought gets cut off by a burst of conversation from his mother. 

She’s in the front seat speaking in rapid Portuguese, her words flitting in the air like hundreds of little birds, brushing my ears with the unfamiliar feel of their wings. Even though I don’t understand it’s pleasant to listen, especially when Oli occasionally pipes up a reply, his voice purring beside my ear. Sometimes, though, I can’t escape the feeling that his words sound clipped despite his lyrical tone. 

“I think we should speak in English, Mother, so that Adrian understands,” he says at last. 

She tilts her head slightly back at us from the front seat, peering over the top of her black, immaculately shiny sunglasses, even though they’re at odds with this weather. I can just see her mascara-ladened lashes fluttering behind the frames, a wry shadow drawing up her lips. Her thoughts are so plain that I can catch them from the cackle of the air between us — those stupid Americans, of course they only know one language. 

I wish Oli hadn’t said anything. There’s no way to war with that innocence of his though — I know he genuinely wants for all of this to work. I feel him shift slightly beside me, as if he’s caught on to what he’s done. 

“Of course. My apologies,” his mother says in crisp English after a moment. “Oli can catch you up on all I’ve said.” She turns back around, twirling her supple fingers through the air in dismissal. Her rings catch the light, the stunning emerald on one flashing a startling green.

I turn back to Oli, but he’s turned away to petulantly stare out the window. I check against the reflection in the front window that his mother’s not looking — she’s gone back to doing something on her phone — before I slip my hand under my coat piled in my lap to find his hand somewhere among the folds. My fingers finally brush the warmth of skin and I let my hand engulf his, squeezing it once to get his attention. He tilts his head back to me, and all I can think about is how his curls tumble into his face with the movement, of how badly I want to take my other hand and brush all of that hair out of the way. 

“You didn’t miss much,” he says quietly, his smile drawn. 

“Why’d you say anything?” I whisper back.

He flicks his eyes briefly towards the front before leaning in closer towards me, his lips stopping only a few inches from my ear. I shiver against the warm caress of his breath as he speaks. 

“Because we cannot let her win.”

—

She may have made us drag and shove our luggage around, but we’re staying at the Ritz-Carlton just by Central Park. If someone had told me a few months ago that I’d get to see the interior of that hotel, I would’ve laughed. 

“Don’t get too used to it,” Oli’s mother says as she hands us the room key. She flicks her wrist over to look at a neat little gold watch that glimmers impressively in the amber light. “Get dressed. I want to see you two down here in half an hour.”

With that she leaves us, clicking away in her heeled boots towards the elevators, a flustered-looking bellboy rushing after her weighed down with her designer bags. Our own bellboy looks after her with something among the lines of awe.

“Hate to pry, but is that your mama?” He says to Oli as he begins pushing the bellman cart in the same direction, but at our much more leisurely pace. 

“Uh-huh,” Oli says without much of his usual amusement.

“She’s really something.”

“Don’t get too used to it,” Oli softly snaps back, and I have to swallow my laugh. He looks over at me, and his eyes turn bright and easy. 

Our room, naturally, has two twin beds. Oli takes one look at them and rolls his eyes, and we promptly get to shoving them together. I wince at the shriek the bedposts make against the floor as we drag them together, my body coiled in preparation for the noise complaint to come at any minute. When there’s an actual knock on the door, I nearly jump out of my skin. 

“I’ll get it,” Oli says with a sigh. 

I leave him to deal with the angry staff, wandering towards the large crystalline window that dominates the room. I shove the velvety curtains apart, opening up the view on Central Park. Looking out onto the park this close from above for the first time is mesmerizing — I see a piece of The Pond below from behind the skeletal trees and my heart clenches a bit. We got yelled at once there with my mother for slipping bread to the ducks. 

It’s bittersweet being back here in the city, especially by the place where I spent so many summer afternoons when I came to stay with my mother. I can almost see it as vividly as the glare of the car lights in the street below right now, I can almost taste it as sweetly as the bag of cherries we’d bring to snack on when we’d lounge on the Great Lawn. Her fingers stained with charcoal as she’d sketch the skyline sprawling above the tree tops, her hands wrapped around mine on the remote I’d use to sail around the little model boat on the Conservatory Water. Her face dappled with sunlight as she’d tilt her head back to look up at the canopy above, a curl of ebony hair drifting down her cheek tugged loose from her bun in the breeze. She’d look down at me and smile like I was the whole world, and only one other person has ever looked at me like that.

“Pretty view.”

I turn to the voice to find Oli beside me, his breath slightly fogging the chilled window. My fingertips are unconsciously pressed against the glass in front of me, as if I were reaching for that place beyond the window, the long-gone fragments of the memories it held. My fingers leave a smear on the spotless surface when I drop them. 

“Did you get yelled at?”

“For what?” He says. I suddenly realize he is holding something — two hangers with black garment bags over them. 

“Oh my god. Are those suits?”

He hands me one of the hangers with a sheepish grin. “I told you, my life is, for a lack of a better word, strange.”

“Where exactly are we going?” I unzip the garment bag to find a pinstripe navy suit, the silky material beneath the pinch of my fingers undoubtedly of fine make. “Will this even fit me?”

Oli shrugs and unzips his own suit — a black one — and lackadaisically throws it on the bed. The price tag sprawls on the sheets face-up, the number sending a brief shockwave through me.

“I said we’re more or less the same size. And I don’t know — both of my parents never tell me anything. We might be dressing up just to go buy a hotdog on the street. I don’t even know.” 

We glance at the elaborate clock hanging on the wall at the same time, realizing that we have a little less than ten minutes left to meet his mother in the lobby. 

“Well, we need to make a move on,” Oli says, beginning to kick his clothes off right where he stands. It’s really hard to believe that the boy who ordinarily undresses this way is the same one who wears suits in the four-digit price range. I get to changing as well, albeit I’m naturally somewhat less chaotic in the process. We get dressed with a few minutes to spare, except now we’re stuck at the foreseeable barrier of trying to tie our own ties correctly. 

“How do you not know how to do it?” I say, as Oli struggles to do mine. My father once tried to teach me how to do it, but since his patience lasts just about as long as a lit matchstick in the wind, I’ve never gotten down the technique. 

“It’s been a while. And there, look. I did it.” He tugs on my tie, and I turn to the mirror to assess his work. It’s lopsided, just like his, but I look more dapper than I’ve probably ever looked in my life. 

“It’s lopsided,” I say, just to see that annoyed flick of his eyes. 

“I think your glasses are just lopsided. Here.” I bat his hand away as he tries to straighten my glasses, which are already straight. 

“Shouldn’t we start heading down?” I say through a burst of laughter as I try to evade him. He grabs onto my tie and tugs me toward him, rendering me helpless.

“Okay. I see where you’re coming from. It is a little lopsided. Maybe. But you know what?” His mouth is so close to mine I can feel the breath of every word.

“What?” I say. I know I’m smiling, smiling like an idiot. 

“You’re so fucking hot right now that it cancels it out. Anyone who points out the tie is paying attention to the wrong thing.” With that he closes the gap between us and his mouth is on mine, pressing me against the wall dangerously close to the mirror which rattles precariously behind my back. If it shatters, I think it’ll be the least of my concerns. 

“We’ll be late,” I try to say, but it gets lost in the space between our lips. He still has my tie clenched in one hand and my hair in the other, and I let my own fingers run through the unruly mass of his like I’ve been dreaming to do all day. One of us has to come up for breath eventually, but this moment right now is blissful enough to fall in love with the thought of suffocating. He breaks away first, leaning forwards to press his nose into the side of my face.

“God, I don’t want to go.” His voice reverberates against my cheek, through my whole body. I lift my hand to cup the other side of his face.

“It’ll be fine,” I say, even though I don’t know what we’re getting ourselves into. “We’ll stay by each other’s sides. Like always.”

“She’ll try to break us apart.” For the first time I hear in his voice genuine uncertainty tipping into fear. The emotion is so far departed from his easy manner that my heart fissures at the timbre of his words.

“Then let her try.” I say, brushing my fingers down the side of his cheek. He shivers slightly under my touch and pulls away.

He looks at me for a moment, his hands weighted on top of my shoulders. I see his eyes slide to a spot behind me, and I realize he’s caught his reflection in the mirror.

“We’re a mess,” he says as he attempts to first smooth down his hair, then mine. His lips are kissed red and I’m guessing mine are much the same, but there’s not much to be done about that.

“Physically or metaphorically?” I say, earning an amused smirk from him. He then looks down to push the cuff of his suit up his wrist, checking the time.

“Okay. Fuck. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait for the elevator.”

We scramble to get our coats and our shoes on, which we’ve also been supplied but happen to be a size too small for me, but there’s not enough time to begin thinking about that. We nearly forget our room key and get locked out in the whole process, but fortunately my intuition served me enough to put my foot in the threshold in the last moment before the door shut. We’re in the glossy elevator now, which by a miracle of the heavens we did not have to wait for, both breathing heavily as if we’ve run a marathon. Even Oli’s a little flushed after that scramble.

“Okay, okay. We should be good. One thing though —” He pats his pockets for a minute, and then there’s ostensible relief on his face when he finally fishes out his phone from somewhere among the layers. “We need a picture. Together. When else are we going to look this cool?” 

We hastily shed our coats after having just put them on, and Oli shuffles over closer to me to place one of his arms around me while he diligently picks out the right instagram filter on his phone. We have only a few floors left and at any moment someone might walk in on us posing in the elevator mirror, standing among the detritus of our coats and scarves on the floor. Not to mention that we both look like we’ve either gone for a run or fucked each other. Or maybe both.

“Let’s try not to look so flustered maybe,” he says, tilting his phone to line up the shot. Remarkably we don’t have so many pictures of us together — maybe because we’re always either together on our own or we’re too caught up with one another to think of taking any — so I’ve still not learned my good angles as well as he has. Oli tilts his head so that a clutch of his hair falls perfectly in his face to frame it, a mysterious semi-smile crawling up his lips. He takes his other hand hanging from my neck and without moving the rest of his body uses it to gently tilt my face to a certain angle. 

“Smile but not too much, Adrian,” he says, and I try to follow that ambiguous command as closely as I can. I flick my eyes to the mirror and there’s a moment where I don’t instantly recognize my reflection. The boy in the dark navy suit is someone I haven’t met before — he’s got a coy smile but there’s an air of something solid about him, almost like a tangible confidence. It’s there in his bright eyes and the high color of his cheeks, in the unbothered unruliness of his hair and the rumpled collar. He seems to match the careless flamboyance of the boy beside him, the arrogance of being drunk on youth and love. The pair of them could be right at home on the cover of a magazine, those people that seem too ethereal to be inhabiting the same world as your own. 

I feel Oli relax his pose beside me when he’s taken the picture and the strangeness of the moment drops away. Still, the more I study my reflection the more disconcerting it becomes — a cognitive dissonance of sorts. I look like I actually belong beside him, the boy who feels like walking next to a god. 

“This is too nice to put on my story,” he says as he studies the picture on his phone. I draw my eyes away from the mirror to look over, but we’ve hit the ground floor and the elevator doors slide open with their soft hiss. We hastily spill out into the lobby, trying to casually rush to the front. 

We’ve just made it when she appears as if drawn out of the air, in a deep-red cocktail dress and a fur coat that seems to nearly envelope her whole. Her lips done blood-red to match her dress curl crudely when her eyes settle on our disheveled states.

“Your tie’s lopsided,” she hisses when she walks up to her son, jerking the thin strip of fabric around his neck all but gently as she undoes it and smartly reties it. Oli looks at anywhere but his mother, his lashes tilted up as he regards the sparkling chandelier overhead. 

When she’s finished she glances over at me, her fingers briefly jerking in my direction. She decides the better of it though, for after all I’m not her son, someone of much the opposite regard. She tosses her hair with a finality and begins to march towards the exit, not stopping to see if we follow her.

We trail after her out of the lack of any other option, Oli wearing a stony expression — all the playful flame of before extinguished. He has his fingers twisting in the knot of his tie, trying to loosen it from the vice-like strangle of his mother’s handiwork. 

“Here, let me,” I murmur, stopping briefly to help him while her back’s still to us. He catches my hand in the air though, his grip on my fingers firm. 

“Not right now,” he says under his breath, shaking his head slightly. He lets my hand slip from his and turns away from me a little abruptly, all his gentle grace gone. 

And here I learn the rules of the game for tonight: tricky stares and accidentally brushing up hands, looking away from each other when we speak and sliding our ankles against one another’s under the table. I know he never means it, when he takes up this aloofness — but each time it chips off a bigger piece of my heart than before, each time I worry if it’ll be the time he’ll never snap back out of it.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact: this was meant to be posted a week before but then life got in the way??  
> fun fact #2: i get emotional sometimes writing and for any reason this chapter hit me straight in the heart so have fun knowing that!!  
> fun fact #3: I have too much caffeine in my system and all i want to do is write but i have to get up in like four hours so i don't know how to cope with this situation

“ _Lola_ ,” the man sings, walking up to embrace Oli’s mother with a peck of the lips on each cheek. She gracefully does the same, then sheds her fur coat into the man’s waiting hands with the first smile I’ve seen on her sharp lips. It makes her even more so beautiful, but there’s something that gives a dangerous edge to her features — something sweet as poison, something of all the beauty of a venomous snake. Admire it too closely and it will strike you.

“And this must be your boy,” the man says silkily, proffering a hand to Oli. Oli gracefully steps up to clasp it with a moneyed smile, every inch of him dripping with his easy charisma. I know this Oli — it’s the one that surfaces when there are people to impress. When he realizes that he’s not the only god on the block. 

There’s small talk but I get lost from it into the surroundings. I’m not sure where or what we are at exactly — I lost track of where we were going in the cab because it started snowing heavily, and I was too busy tracing Oli’s silent silhouette in the gloom. Now we’re in a place that appears to be a penthouse, the multi-million dollar Manhattan type, and we’ve walked into the middle of a soirée, the multimillionaire type. Everyone’s dressed to the nines, and suddenly I don’t feel quite as classy as I did back at the hotel — every time someone glances our way, the diamond-wreathed women or sharp-suited men, I feel like they can sense with their narrowing eyes the permanent dirt under my fingernails. 

“And this is Adrian.” 

I turn at hearing my name, especially at the sound of it coming from Oli’s mouth. The man welcoming us, who I realize must be the host, stands looking at me expectedly, and I hastily shake his hand — what is it that you’re supposed to do again? Firm handshake, make eye contact? There’s a critical glint to his eyes that makes me think I’ve missed something important. 

“How do you do? Quite the company you’ve found,” he says as he begins to gradually lead us into the grand living room.

“He’s my —” Oli begins to supply in my drawn silence as I think of something to say besides a mumble, but his mother briskly cuts him off.

“He’s a friend from the university,” she says smoothly, her lips pressed together in a cutting smile. 

“Columbia, was it? Good of you two to get in there. Heard it takes quite the aptitude or the brains,” he says absently, stopping to exchange the coat for a couple of flutes of champagne from a server suddenly appearing at his elbow. I resist the urge to roll my eyes at his words, as if I’ve fairly gotten in, but that fact wouldn’t help my case for being here. The host hands one glass to Oli’s mother, and then does a double-take when he glances back and sees us, as if he’s already forgotten that we’re there.

“Do you drink, boys?” He asks us, and then hastily turns to Oli’s mother. “Can they drink, Lola? It’s Brignac,” he says, as if this somehow justifies it.

“We don’t follow the drinking age of the States,” she simply says, taking a sip from her glass, her eyes narrowed on us as if she expects us to come up with some sort of proper reply to this. I’m drawing a blank. 

“Well, if it’s alright —” Oli begins for the both of us, but there’s already a slender flute being pressed into my hand. I’ve tried cheap champagne, somewhere — but I don’t remember being left with an avid impression of it. Oli’s got his cat’s smile, however, and I just know he must like this stuff, whatever it is. His mother shoots him a glance from behind her sweeping lashes, and I watch him lift the flute to his lips to mask his pleasure. 

Someone from the crowd recognizes her and sweeps over to dote on her dress, and with that there is a ripple of eyes on her, many wandering over to immediately pull her into conversation. The host tags at her side like a puppy, eager to be the first to introduce her to the curiously turned faces. A cloud of socialites forms around the two of them, gradually sweeping into the expansive room like an advancing weather system. Oli and I fall behind the prattling flock, contentedly sipping our champagne and trying not to step on anyone’s toes accidentally.

“So, your mom’s name is Lola?” I say after a swig, the thought fizzing aimlessly into my mind with the bubbles on my tongue. 

Oli rolls his eyes dramatically, and I just glimpse a finely-clad older woman catch the gesture with a look of mild affront. “Lola and Leo. How did they not name me with something beginning with an L?” He says, smiling around the rim of his glass. 

“She never introduced herself to me,” I say. It’s something that’s been haunting my mind since earlier today. 

Oli shrugs, seemingly unfazed by the fact. “She doesn’t make it easy.” 

As if summoned, his mother tips her head away from a conversation and levels her eyes on Oli, her fingers curling in the barest gesture for him to come. Here I was, content to stick to his side for the rest of the night — but now it seems like my life raft is about to drift away from me into the storm. 

He turns to me at just the moment that she turns back, his eyes apologetic. _Fuck me_ , he mouths right before he turns away, his hand inconspicuously brushing against mine with the movement. I want to mouth back _gladly_ but he’s already gone, prancing gracefully across the room with a natural flamboyance that I’ve learned he can turn on like flicking a switch. He’s the shimmering boy again that had haunted my attention throughout lectures, that had made me want to stab a pencil through my heart at times. I’d mistaken his candor for arrogance, his reserve for haughtiness. He’s an ocean and I’ve only just dove barely below the surface. 

I aimlessly mill about the people, trying whatever gets offered to me from the silvery platters — salty caviar on crackers; foie gras on miniature brioches; something on a tiny skewer that happens to be dipped in chocolate much to my delight. I could swear that a few seconds ago my champagne glass was half-empty but now it’s magically been refilled; I take a sip and the bubbles fizz on my tongue, sweet and bitter at the same time. I watch Oli making his rounds through breaks in the crowd, his mother always possessively at his side. Her hand rests on his shoulder, all her rings glimmering against the black fabric. I sometimes spot the man I assumed to be the host drifting casually in their wake, always conversing with whoever that happens just to be a few steps behind Lola’s back. Oli’s stolen his spot at her side, and I catch him eyeing Oli with a wistful envy between gaps of his own discourse. Sometimes he swoops into their conversation, and even if he’s addressing the whole circle, his chin is always tilted towards her, his shoulder just shy of brushing up against hers. I don’t miss how Oli’s bright eyes track his movements, how his smile goes just a little bit flat when there’s a pass made too close to his mother. 

Almost every time I look over Oli appears to be talking, practically dripping with that easy, infatuating radiance of youth — he has the aristocratic-looking older women hanging on the edge of his lambent smile, the men who usually cannot tolerate the likes of his age find themselves helpless to his magnetizing charisma. His mother holds that feline smile at his shoulder that he’s inherited in a more playful form, and I’m just wondering what she’s trying to get him to sell or receive — he’s told me bluntly before that it’s not beyond her to use him as a front to get things: exclusive invitations and sought-after contacts, the promise to get a word with the duke of some rich European country. No one can refuse him, the boy who could charm the sun to come out on a rainy day. 

People are beginning to catch on that I’m someone’s loose thread, just floating about; I get casually drawn into a conversation on whether it’s better to vacation in Mallorca or on the Amalfi Coast (I haven’t been to either, so my input is lacking). Thereafter I promptly get asked if I’m that boy from Broadway, you know, the one from the show last night? They begin to look bewildered, trying to figure out who I am — when they learn of my name and that I grew up in Connecticut, someone asks if it’s my family’s surname that has its name in one of Yale’s halls. I shrug and decide to go along with it out of anything better to grasp onto in my negligible, nonexistent family history — because maybe who knows, what if there was an Ivy League benefactor hidden somewhere among my father’s line? They seem mildly impressed for a minute, and then a withered old man in Burberry launches into a recollection at his prehistoric time at Yale. At that I decide to slip out of the conversation, scouring the place for a quiet corner that I could dissociate into. Oli’s still in a social bind with no end appearing in sight. 

There’s something in the likes of an elegant coffee table accompanied by a collection of sleek leather armchairs and a couch, situated right by one of the floor-to ceiling windows glimmering with the lights of Manhattan below. There’s a single occupant on one side of the couch; a dark-haired girl about my age with a smoldering cigarette in one hand and a champagne flute in the other. She looks especially lovely but not approachable, her darkly-smudged eyes a formidable weight on the room. I decide to take my chances — the longer I stand in the throng the more it’s beginning to feel like I’m a carcass being circled by coyotes.

I pick out an armchair as distant from the girl as possible, putting all of my attention on nursing my glass of champagne, which is never not full no matter how many swigs of it I take. It doesn’t take long before I hear the unmistakable squeak of flesh sliding against leather. 

“Bored already?” The girl says as I look up at where she’s relocated herself to — right next to the arm of the couch that stands inches from my chair. She takes a drag at her cigarette while she waits for my reply, but I can’t stop taking her in at this close — there is something pleasantly chilling about the intensity of her dark eyes, outlined in an even stronger black. The unconcealed smattering of freckles on the ridges just below her lashes seem to contrast startlingly with her elegant features —it’s a face you’ll find yourself remembering even if you don’t want to, a curse to hold your attention. 

“I just ... need a break,” I decide to say, hoping that she’ll take the hint. She doesn’t casually withdraw, though, like I’d gambled — instead she dips a finger below her neckline and produces another cigarette, proffering it to me in her slender fingers. 

“Oh, I don’t —”

“Suit yourself, then,” she says, slipping it back in such a quick movement that it seemingly disappears right out of her fingers. “Not supposed to be smoking in here, anyways — Van Halsten hates it — but his attention is elsewhere tonight.” 

My most logical conclusion is that she’s talking about the host, and the way he’s come to be blind to all but Oli’s mother and a few other women I’ve seen him try to inconspicuously ogle. 

“You shouldn’t be smoking, like at all, though. It’s bad for your lungs.” It slips out matter-of-factly, my mind supplying the words automatically. I press my lips closed before I can come close to offending a possible heiress or whoever she may be. 

“Okay, Mister You-Shouldn’t-Be-Smoking, thanks for the advice. Do you have a name or shall I refer to you as that for the rest of the night?”

“Adrian,” I say, a little tersely. Giving my name out to these people feels like giving ground in a battle I’m unknowingly fighting. 

She nods, as if she expected no other name than that one. “Claudia. Surely a pleasure,” she says, her mouth curling into something of a smile.

A moment passes, and I don’t know what to say — I just want Claudia to leave me to sulk alone with my own thoughts to distract me, but I’m not sure there is a way to politely phrase that. She seems keen on talking to me though, and there’s an unpleasant feeling building in my gut that tells me I’m at her mercy. Until I know who she is on the hierarchy, there’s no graceful way of shrugging her off. 

“This is the part, Adrian, where you either kiss my cheeks or my hand, or at the very least do that little half-hug that’s more of an excuse to go for a little groping,” she says to fill the lull between us. It’s quite sudden and pointed enough that I feel my cheeks burn. 

“Now how am I supposed to do that if you’re sitting!” I say quite defensively. I wish I was briefed on a little etiquette beforehand, but I get the feeling that Oli is winging everything he does anyways.

“Don’t worry; I didn’t expect you to. You wouldn’t even do that if I was standing in front of you with a tilted cheek.”

I’m about to drudge up another reply to this unwarranted attack, but she plows on before I can even lace two words together. 

“You don’t fit in,” she continues, absently tapping the ash off her cigarette into the ashtray. “You look like a dog wandered into a pack of fucking wolves.” 

“Really? What am I missing?” I attempt to sound apathetic, but really I’m genuinely curious. It shows in the slight catch of my words much to my chagrin. 

She chortles in a way I don’t quite expect, coming from a girl dressed in what’s probably Prada. “Oh, it’s nothing tangible. You’re dressed acceptable enough, maybe only the rims of your glasses can give it away but the lighting’s low enough that you’d have to look. It’s the mannerisms; it’s the air you carry yourself with. You just genuinely look like you don’t believe that you belong with these people.”

“Well, I don’t,” I say, swishing around the champagne going flat in the crystal flute. “I don’t even know what these people are.”

“People in hedge funds, oil tycoons. Trust fund sons and daughters. Models and athletes turned socialites,” she says, nodding pointedly at Oli’s mother.

“Which one are you?” I say.

“I’ve never modeled.”

“I’m guessing you’re not into oil either.”

She nods. “Daddy’s got a big name.”

There’s finally a silence where she pensively fiddles with her cigarette. I watch Oli in the crowd, and it’s as if I’m seeing him for those first few times again — the golden boy, who can talk to anyone and everyone talks to. I feel like I’ve been trapped in a twisted time-warp. 

“Look,” I begin, having the sudden urge to justify myself. “I got dragged here.”

“By your boyfriend?”

I almost spit out the champagne I had taken a swig of.

“How the fuck —“

“ _Shhhh_. Language!” She says leaning forward, but there’s a wicked smile on her crimson lips. “I just know, okay? Like, it’s not too hard. One of you is always looking at the other the moment one looks away. The two of you are basically begging to go fuck somewhere.”

“God, is it that evident?”

“Don’t worry. You see all of these people here?” She says, motioning lackadaisically to the whole gathered majority. “They’re too closed-minded to be able to tell. Two pretty boys don’t add up in their heads like they do in ours.”

“I hope you’re right,” I say faintly. I feel slightly sick, wondering if anyone else has caught on yet. I already know Oli’s mother is breathing hot on our necks. 

“My question is, though …” Claudia leans in even closer, dropping her voice. This close she carries an aroma like rotten flowers, her bitter breath mixing with her saccharine perfume. I want to lean away, but I’m petrified — her dark eyes pin me in place like two nails through the wings of a butterfly. “Do you swing both ways?”

 _Oh, god_. I want to flee, but there is no where to go — if I’m not torn apart by these maws, then I’ll just stumble into the next ones. “I’m … not interested,” I say. Picking out the words feels like picking up broken glass. I still manage to cut myself.

She laughs, again, and there is something cataclysmic in the sound, something that makes my skin prickle like being out in the middle of a lightening storm. “Oh, you’re _funny_. I was just wondering, but I don’t mind the conclusion. Truly, I’m flattered. I’ve already got someone I’m rather unfortunately tied to, though.” 

She’s a riddle I can’t solve, especially not when I start feeling the fuzziness of alcohol intrude in on my head like a spreading blight. I want nothing more than to slip my eyes from her to find Oli, to reach out for the steadiness of him, like trying to feel the bottom with your feet when you’re drowning. But I can’t stand the thought of her spearing on to that, so I look her straight in the eyes, a coffee-ground brown now that I can tell up close, and say, “What do you want, then?”

She doesn’t even take a breath. “Your attention.”

“I’m not much in the state or desire to give it to you.”

“I’m starting to see that. Do you want me to get it for you, then? Your attention?”

I narrow my eyes at her. “What do you mean?”

Her lips curve in a dangerous way. “Follow me.”

She rises from the couch in one graceful move, smoothing out her black dress in an efficient sweep of her hands. She beckons me up and starts towards a nearby doorway leading to a side room, which from my vantage point in the armchair has given me the impression of a kitchen, the reflection of shiny appliances refracting off the span of the windows. 

I’m torn, between staying and going — I know that if Oli would just look at me now, if he’d just give me the barest tilt of his honey-colored head, I’d be sorted. But his back stays stubbornly turned to me until it gets altogether obscured by a flock of socialites.

So I wander through the threshold into the kitchen, which feels altogether illicit, but there’s no one inside except for Claudia and a stack of discarded platters to witness my trespassing. The kitchen in itself is at least double that of my old dorm room, everything crisp and sterile as if it’d been unboxed yesterday. I’d stand about longer to admire it if Claudia hadn’t started past it towards a narrow staircase standing between the pantry and the corner of a wall. She lifts a finger to her lips before ascending, which feels hardly a necessary warning given the din of the conversation in the other room masking our lurking. She slips her heels off and begins to pad up the steps, her stocking-clad feet hardly making a sound on the polished wood. I give her a considerate berth before I follow her, but my shoes clack in a way that makes her hiss at me — whatever we’re doing, it’s beginning to feel a lot more nefarious. I wrestle my feet out of them and continue on up.

At the very top, there is a rather austere door, which Claudia opens with a soft click. I feel the cascade of cool air down the steps even some ways behind her, the breeze a welcome freshness in the mugginess accumulating in the apartment that I hand’t noticed until now. I follow her through the threshold, holding my fingers against the door with care to keep it from slamming shut behind me.

We’ve entered into something of a rooftop greenhouse. There’s a vast patio with immense window panes set in between a skeleton of delicate white frames, rising on either side and intersecting at a peak above. I let the door gently snick shut behind me, leaving Claudia and me to the shadowy light filtering in from the city lights all around and below. A layer of snow has begun accumulating on the glass panes slanted up above, diffusing the amber glow of the city into a muffled blanket of wan yellow. There’s plants all around as well — droopy ferns and trellised vines, a few modest potted trees and the silhouette of some flower blooms that I can just make out in the partial darkness. A segment of one of the large windows is partially slid open, perhaps negligently — there’s just a bare dusting of snow on the ground where the wind carries it in, melting into a shimmer of water 

Even in the almost-dark, it’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.

“This is …” I begin to say, the words melting faster on my tongue than even the snow hitting the ground.

“You haven’t seen it in the summer,” Claudia says, serenely circling about the place. She pauses a few times to admire the flora, her fingers ghosting over leaves and petals. She lingers by what looks like a miniature pomegranate tree, her hand milk-white against the dark shape of the fruit as she inspects it. 

“But it is summer in here all the time, isn’t it?”

She laughs softly at my mesmerized words and drifts towards the exposed gap in the greenhouse wall. She turns to lean back against the white rim of the ledge, tipping her head back so that the snowflakes get caught in her raven hair. A soft halo of light forms around her head from the glowing frames of the neighboring building.

“Come feel the winter, then.”

I slide my feet back into my shoes and walk over to the open air, drawn in by her voice. There’s enough space to just fit the two of us side by side by ledge. The air is intoxicatingly cold — I feel drunk on its kiss, the blood in my veins still feverishly hot while my skin roils with goosebumps. 

“It won’t end well, it never does. Not with the two of you,” she says, her words dripping in a puff of white from her lips. It feels like the snow on the roof has collapsed in over my head, glass shards and ice alike impaling into my flesh.

“What do you mean?” My voice is hardly a wisp against the snow-touched breeze. I only know I’ve spoken because of the condensation crystallizing on my tongue. 

“It’s alright, though. You’ll always get to see each other in the end, after all,” she says. She puts a thumb on my lips and softly slides it across, seaming them shut against the spill of confused words building up behind them. I hear the barest click in the stillness around us, but it must be my heel coming down as I try to step back, yet I’ve frozen against moving.

“You know what it means, but just not yet. Enjoy it while it lasts.” She drops her hand and shifts back from me, and in the bare light I can just see the outline of a sad smile on her dark lips. We must be drunk, the both of us so drunk on that ridiculously expensive champagne, that she’s talking in riddles and I’m still trying to make sense of them. Yet her words were clear; piercing, like the ring of glass through the din of conversation — they make me feel like I’ve swallowed ice. It's an icky, building anxiety from something I can’t name. 

She turns back from me and the glass wall just as I hear the sound of a purposeful step coming from the direction of the door. I turn to find Oli standing there, his head cocked slightly in a curious manner — but even from here, even in this almost-darkness I can sense the predatory edge in his eyes, in the line of his mouth. He had come up so quietly, yet how can I be so surprised? He knows how to move with the stealth of a panther, always coming to lace his arms around my neck from behind me when I least expect it, not even a scuff of the shoe to warn me. 

“It was interesting to meet you in this life, Adrian,” Claudia says, tilting her head slighting towards me in parting as she turns to pad towards the door, her bare stockinged feet trudging mindlessly through the dusting of snow. I want to catch her pale arm to keep her from slipping out so simply like this, leaving me with the fragments of her chilling words and the storm of Oli. Instead I stand unmoving, growing cold in the snowfall as I watch her leave, inclining her head towards Oli without receiving the gesture in return. The open door offers just the quickest wash of light before it clicks shut behind her, and I’m left back in this ethereal respite from winter with Oli.

He begins to walk towards me, every step deliberate, patient — the gait of a savanna predator on the prowl. He stops beside me but doesn’t look at me, only goes to rest his forearms on the open ledge. 

“Who was she?” He says, his voice almost flat. I try to keep myself from wincing at his tone.

The words blubber up in my mouth, each one more pathetic than the last. “Just some girl — I got tired of bullshitting through conversations, so I went to sit down in the corner and she was there, and —"

“So, the fact that she was close enough to do this,” he takes a thumb and runs it over my lips, electrifying my body at his touch and shutting me up exactly as it did before. “Means that you were just talking?” 

I squeeze my eyes shut for a second, trying to figure out how to navigate the headache of this. “Please, Oli. She’s just drunk and bored and talking utter nonsense and I just happened to be in the way, and if you think I give a single flying fuck about her then you can go off at me. Swear me out, if you want. I’ll listen if it makes you feel better.” It’s good he’s not looking at me because my fingers are starting to shake, the last few minutes becoming more peculiar the more I replay them in my head. I feel scraped raw emotionally, Oli’s brooding state making me bleed all the more. 

He’s silent a moment, and I think he’s actually going to start screaming at me. But instead he bows his head, all his curls spilling forward to mask his face from me.

“God, how can I ever possibly stay mad at you?” He says, his voice low. He stares down at his hands dangling over the ledge, and I watch as a few stray snowflakes drift into his hair. “You could tell me you want to cut my heart out and I’ll give you the knife to do it,” he says, and at that I want to do nothing more than to bury my face in his neck and cry. 

“I’m sorry, I really am,” I say lamely, even as I try comprehend how I could’ve let myself go so wrong. There’s nothing else to say to him, and somehow staying silent feels like the worst thing when usually it’s the savior. He shifts a bit to move his hair out of his face, tilting it so that he can look at me. His face is still stony, his eyes lacking their flame, but at least he’s looking at me, and I can stare back without feeling the guilt drown me.

“I suppose I’ve done way worse with Allura,” he finally says.

“Oh god Oli, we weren’t even —“ 

“I still knew, back then, what you were to me,” he begins, cutting me off. “Sometimes I felt like I had dreamt you into reality. That’d I met you before I’d actually met you, that there could be no other outcome except for me and you. I knew it in my heart like I know that the sun will rise every day no matter what happens in the night. I was fucking her and I felt like I would shatter, that I would come undone — and because of that I thought there was something fundamentally wrong with me. Because going by the rules I’m not supposed to love you, am I?”

 _It won’t end well, it never does. Not with the two of you._ I want to scream; I want to cry; I want to tip over the open ledge and fall head-first down into the street just to have the rush of the air roar over those words now trapped in my head, both hers and his. _I’m not supposed to love you, am I?_

Two parallels, and I’m stuck in that empty space between them, an infinite cage in either direction. It's like I’m walking through a minefield, like I’m bound to get blown up into the heavens at any moment. I want to echo Claudia’s words back at him, but that feels like a sure detonation. Instead I draw in the cold air slowly through my teeth like I used to do as a little kid, to set the nerve endings on fire under all that enamel to give me something sharp to focus on. I say the first thing that falls into my mind, grabbing words like stars out of the sky. 

“The first time I saw you I forgot how to breathe. It was like coming home, Oli. And no matter how hard the journey will be, your home is the one thing that always stays steady.” If I close my eyes, I can still see him behind the fence on the track — a golden mirage solidifying into a boy, a dream walking into the waking world. How can any words, just these particles of air shaped into sound by the throat, convince me to let something like that go?

He lays his hand on top of mine and I almost want to sob in relief, and I can feel him tilting his head towards mine. It all happens so slow and fast, time falling away in this silent space between us — but then his hand suddenly withdraws from mine, as if burnt. 

I open my mouth to say something, anything, knowing that nothing will come out, but he’s already turned to look back behind him, his face white with something like terror. I follow his line of sight, everything coming together as if in slow-motion: seeing his mother with her arms folded across her chest, staring uncompromisingly at us like a ram about to charge. There’s no telling how long she’s been there, and I just pray to whoever is up there that she couldn’t have heard everything we had just laid raw to each other. 

She says something, but it’s in Portuguese — it comes out hardly more than a hiss, low and biting enough that I don’t need to know the translation. Oli replies with something, but his words sound frail compared to hers. They automatically get pummeled by the next thing she says.

“ _You_ , get out of my sight,” she hisses. It takes me a stupefied moment to realize that one, it’s in English, and two, it’s directed at me. I’m torn between staying and leaving, since my legs refuse to move to leave his side even as I try to command them to. So I look at Oli, to see what to do, to not hurt him more than I just have. He nods without quite looking at me, infinitesimally but meaningfully, and I’m fluent enough in our silent language that I know he wants me to go. 

I lift my chin and look at his mother, and for a moment I think I might just say something — to somehow find a justification for all of this, to tell her to go to hell — but I swallow the bitter words, for they could only cause the fallout to be so much worse.

I leave him standing out in the cold, his head hanging down like a praying angel, his hair riddled with snow and outlined in the deathless glow of the city. The only sound is the clap of my feet on the floor as I walk towards the door and the usual din of the city with its sirens and cars and anger-filled people. In between all of that is the eerie soundlessness of winter, the anticlimactic silence of snow falling against the ground; the anticlimactic silence of two people with too much and not enough to say. 

When I close the door behind me, it’s like slamming it against the threshold of my heart.


End file.
